Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

This Weekend: Hackaday x Tindie Meetup At Bay Area Maker Faire.

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Maker Faire Bay Area is this weekend, and the Hackaday and Tindie crew are getting ready to jack some cupcake cars. The Bay Area Maker Faire is one of the greatest gatherings of all the cool people we know, and five years ago we started host a meetup. This Saturday, we’re blowing the roof off our favorite joint in San Mateo yet again. Join us at O’Neill’s Irish Pub for the 5th annual Hackaday x Tindie BAMF Meetup!

This meetup is a well established tradition — it’s all the cool kids at Maker Faire, hanging out in a bar. …read more

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Hackaday Links: May 13, 2018

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The dumbest thing this week is Uber’s flying car concept of the future. The braintrust at Uber envisions a world of skyports, on rooftops or on the ground that will handle 200 takeoffs and landings per hour. That is 4800 per day at a maximum. The record for the number of total takeoffs and landings for any airport was set last year at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji airport with 969 takeoffs and landings in a twenty-four hour period. Yes, Uber wants to put the world’s busiest airport in a parking lot or something. Just wait, it gets dumber. Uber’s ‘flying …read more

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The Current Advances of PCB Motors

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There’s something to be said about the falling costs of printed circuit boards over the last decade. It’s opened up the world of PCB art, yes, but it’s also allowed for some experimentation with laying down fine copper wires inside a laminate of fiberglass and epoxy. We can design our own capacitive touch sensors. If you’re really clever, you can put coils inside four-layer PCBs. If you’re exceptionally clever, you can add a few magnets and build a brushless motor out of a PCB.

We first saw [Carl]’s PCB motor at the beginning of the year, but since then we’ve …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: Open Hardware For Science

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Scientific equipment is expensive. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up a lab. Simply the cost of machines, like data acquisition units or even a simple load cell, can cost hundreds of dollars. This makes research cost prohibitive, and that’s the case even if you do spend a dozen hours a week writing grant proposals. Citizen science is right out, because the cost of the tools to do science is so high.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about Open Hardware for science. This is the chat that’s all about Open Source …read more

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An Ode to Belgrade

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In two weeks the Hackaday Community is gathering in Belgrade for Europe’s greatest hardware con, The Hackaday Belgrade Conference — an event not to be missed — but of course the city itself is a spectacular place to visit and has the perfect feel for those who like to build electronics. Why not join us for your own geek world tour to Serbia? Here’s a few of the things you’ll want to see while in Belgrade.

Aircraft, Inventor, Architecture

Belgrade is a tech center and a hidden jewel of Europe. Need proof? Fly into Belgrade, and you’ll land at Nikola …read more

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Windows Notepad Now Supports Unix Line Endings

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In what is probably this century’s greatest advancement in technology, Windows Notepad now supports Unix line endings. This is it, people. Where were you when Kennedy was assassinated? Where were you when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon? Where were you when Challenger blew up? Where are you now?

Previously, Windows Notepad only supported Windows End of Line Characters — a Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed (LF). Unix text documents use LF for line endings, and Macs use CR for line endings. The end result of this toppling of the Tower of Bable for End of Line characters …read more

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Raspberry Pi Becomes Cycle Exact Commodore Drive Emulator

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The Commodore 1541 disk drive is unlike anything you’ll ever see in modern computer hardware. At launch, the 1541 cost almost as much as the Commodore 64 it was attached to ($400, or about $1040 at today’s value). This drive had a CPU, and had its own built-in operating system. Of course, anyone using a Commodore 64 now doesn’t deal with this drive these days — you can buy an SD2IEC for twenty dollars and load all your C64 games off an SD card. If you’re cheap, there’s always the tape drive interface and a ten dollar Apple Lightning to …read more

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The Adafruit Feather Is A Thing

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A few years ago, Adafruit launched the Feather 32u4 Basic Proto. This tiny development board featured — as you would expect — an ATMega32u4 microcontroller, a USB port, and a battery charging circuit for tiny LiPo batteries. It was, effectively, a small Arduino clone with a little bit of extra circuitry that made it great for portable and wearable projects. In the years since, and as Adafruit has recently pointed out, the Adafruit Feather has recently become a thing. This is a new standard. Maxim is producing compatible ‘wings’ or shields. If you’re in San Fransisco, the streets are …read more

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Hackaday Links: May 6th 2018

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Way back in the day, if you were exceptionally clever, you could just solder more RAM to your computer. You did this by taking a DIP, stacking it on top of an existing RAM chip, bending out the enable pin, and soldering everything down. Wire the enable pin to an address pin, and you have more RAM. [Eric] wanted to get a game running on a Tandy 1000A, but that computer just doesn’t have enough RAM. The solution was to stack the RAMs. It’s a human centipede of deadbugging skills.

We’ve mentioned this before, but I just received another copy …read more

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These Twenty Amazing Projects Won The Open Hardware Design Challenge

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Right now, we’re running the greatest hardware competition on the planet. The Hackaday Prize is the Academy Awards of Open Hardware, and we’re opening the gates to thousands of hardware hackers, makers, and artist to create the next big thing.

Last week, we wrapped up the first challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize. We’re now happy to announce twenty of those entries that have been selected to move to the final round and have been awarded a $1000 cash prize. Congratulations to the winners for the Open Hardware Design Challenge portion of the Hackaday Prize. Here are winners, in no …read more

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