Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Join Hackaday And Tindie This Thursday At Open Hardware Summit

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This weekend Hackaday and Tindie will be trekking out to beautiful Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the greatest congregation of Open Source hardware enthusiasts on the planet. This is the Open Hardware Summit. It’s every year, most of the time in different places, and this year it’s back in the hallowed halls of MIT. Somebody put a car on the roof before we do.

The schedule for this year’s Open Hardware Summit is stuffed to the gills with interesting presentations sure to satiate every hardware nerd. We’ve got talks on Open Source Software Defined Radio, and the people behind the Hackaday Prize …read more

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That TRS Jack On Your Graphing Calculator Does More Than You Think

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It’s not Apple IIs, and it’s not Raspberry Pis. The most important computing platform for teaching kids programming is the Texas Instruments graphing calculator. These things have been around in one form or another for almost three decades, and for a lot of budding hackers out there, this was the first computer they owned and had complete access to.

As hacking graphing calculators is a favorite for Maker Faires, we were pleased to see Cemetech make it out to this year’s World Maker Faire in New York last weekend. They’re the main driving force behind turning these pocket computers with …read more

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A Rotary Axis CNC Machine

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There’s a certain class of parts that just can’t be made on a standard 3-axis mill, nor with a 3D printer or a lathe. These parts — weird screws, camshafts, strange gears, or simply a shaft with a keyway (or two) — can really only be made with a rotary axis on a CNC machine. Sure, you could buy a rotary axis for a Haas or Tormach for thousands of dollars, or you could build your own. That’s exactly what [Adam Zeloof] and [Matt Martone] did with their project at this year’s World Maker Faire in New York. …read more

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The Tiniest Computer Vision Platform Just Got Better

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The future, if you believe the ad copy, is a world filled with cameras backed by intelligence, neural nets, and computer vision. Despite the hype, this may actually turn out to be true: drones are getting intelligent cameras, self-driving cars are loaded with them, and in any event it makes a great toy.

That’s what makes this Kickstarter so exciting. It’s a camera module, yes, but there are also some smarts behind it. The OpenMV is a MicroPython-powered machine vision camera that gives your project the power of computer vision without the need to haul a laptop or GPU along …read more

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Hackaday Links: September 23, 2018

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In the spirit of Nintendo’s NES mini and Super NES mini, Sony is releasing a tiny version of the Playstation. It’s a hundred bucks in December and it comes with Final Fantasy VII, what more do you want? While that’s marginally cool, check out the forums and comments of gaming blogs for some real entertainment — those damn kids won’t get off my lawn and are complaining the included controllers don’t have analog sticks.

This man has solved the range problem for electric cars. He hacked a Prius to run off the overhead wires for San Francisco’s Muni system. Yes, …read more

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Maker Faire NY: Programmable Air

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At this year’s World Maker Faire in New York City we’re astonished and proud to run into some of the best projects that are currently in the running for the Hackaday Prize. One of these is Programmable Air, from [Amitabh], and it’s the solution to pneumatics and pressure sensing in Maker and IoT devices.

The idea behind Programmable Air is to create the cheapest, most hacker-friendly system for dealing with inflatable and vacuum-based robotics. Yes, pneumatic robotics might sound weird, but there’s plenty of projects that could make use of a system like this. The Glaucus is one of the …read more

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Prusa Introduces A Resin Printer at Maker Faire NY

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For one reason or another, the World Maker Faire in New York has become the preeminent place to launch 3D printers. MakerBot did it with the Thing-O-Matic way back when, and over the years we’ve seen some interesting new advances come out of Queens during one special weekend in September.

Today Prusa Research announced their latest creation. It’s the resin printer you’ve all been waiting for. The Prusa SL1 is aiming to become the Prusa Mk 3 of the resin printer world: it’s a solid printer, it’s relatively cheap (kit price starts at $1299/€1299), and it produces prints that are …read more

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The Un-Economy Of Building Your Own Spot Welder

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If there’s one thing that brings hackers together, it’s the ability to build something for less money than it takes to buy it. It’s an exercise [Great Scott Gadgets] put to the test because he was playing around with some 18650 lithium cells, and had a huge need to put some tabs on batteries. This can be done by soldering, but to do it right you should really use a spot welder. Here’s the rub: you can buy a spot welder for about $250, and you can build one for a little less. So, the question: should [Great Scott] build …read more

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The N64 Controller Gets Brass Gears Through 3D Printing

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The controller for the Nintendo 64 is a masterpiece of design, and despite being more than two decades old, people are still using this controller competitively. Smash Bros, you know. Those competitive gaming enthusiasts are hard on their controllers, and after decades and tournaments, the analog stick will wear out. Previously, this required a rebuild or simply replacing the entire controller. Now there’s another option: a completely re-engineered analog stick, all made possible thanks to 3D printing.

[Nam Le] is a student at Cal Poly, and as would be expected for a very specific subset engineering students, had to track …read more

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New Part Day: Put An Alexa In Everything

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The last great hope for electronics manufactures is smart home assistants. The Alexas and Siris and OK Googles are taking over homes across the country. At its best, it’s HAL 9000, only slightly less homicidal. It will entertain your children, and you can order cat litter just by saying you want cat litter. This is the future, whether we like it or not.

In an attempt to capture the market, Amazon has released the Alexa Connect Kit. This is an Amazon-Echo-On-a-Chip — a piece of hardware that adds Alexa to microwaves, blenders, and whatever other bit of home electronics you …read more

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