Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

How To Do PCB Art In Eagle

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Last month I had the pleasure of creating a new piece of hardware for Tindie. [Jasmine], the queen bee of Tindie, and I designed, developed, and kitted three hundred Tindie badges in ten days leading up to DEF CON. The badges were a complete success, they introduced soldering to a lot of people, and were loved by all.

This badge was such a rousing success, it’s now official Tindie swag. We’ll be handing out a few of these blinky badges at upcoming events. But as of right now we’ve already handed out our entire stock, that means we need to …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Manual, CNC Pick And Place Machine

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Everyone who wants a 3D printer probably already has one, and even laser cutters and CNC machines are making their way into garages and basements ’round the world. Pick and place machines are the next great frontier of personal manufacturing, and even though that’s a long way off, [Tegwyn]’s project for this year’s Hackaday Prize is bringing us that much closer to popping down 0201 LEDs reliably.

This project is a manual pick and place machine — otherwise known as ‘tweezers’. It’s a bit more complicated than that, because the entire idea behind [Tegwyn]’s build is to decouple a human’s …read more

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Retrocomputing With Open Source FPGAs

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A few years ago, we saw the reverse engineering of the Lattice iCE40 bitstream, opening the door to a completely Open Source development tool chain for FPGAs. This was an astonishing amount of work from [Clifford Wolf], [Mathias Lasser], and [Cotton Seed], but since then we haven’t seen a whole lot from Project IceStorm. Now, that’s about to change, and in the coolest way possible. [hoglet] is retrocomputing on an ICE40 development board.

This is an implementation of the Acorn Atom on a myStorm BlackIce board. This board is basically just a Lattice iCE40 FPGA, a few support components, and …read more

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Custom Cut Resistor Bandoliers

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Through-hole resistors come on tape that we’re now calling bandoliers. Since [Spencer] is selling a boatload of his RC2014 backplane computer kits on Tindie, he’s been chopping up a lot of resistor bandoliers. It’s a boring and monotonous job.

Fortunately, a lot of people have had a bandolier cutting problem over the years, and there are some hobbyist-grade robots that will do this work for you. One of the more popular robots tasked for bandolier cutting is a laser cut robot. However, if you already have a laser cutter, why not just use the laser to cut the bandoliers? It’s …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Sonic Glasses

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This year, the Hackaday Prize is going to find the most innovative and interesting assistive technologies. Whether that’s refreshable Braille displays or reliable utensils for the disabled, the finalists for the Assistive Technologies portion of the Prize will be creating some of the most interesting tech out there.

For his entry into the Assistive Technology part of the Prize, [Pawit] is building binaural glasses for the blind. It’s difficult to navigate unknown environments without a sense of sight, and these SonicScape glasses turn cheap distance sensors into head-mounted sonar.

The glasses are built around a pair of ultrasonic distance sensors …read more

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Upverter Joins Altium

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In a post on the Upverter blog today, [Zak Homuth], founder of the online EDA suite Upverter has announced they have been acquired by Altium.

The largest change in the announcement is the removal of Upverter’s paid professional tier of service. Now, the entirety of Upverter is free. Previously, this paid professional tier included CAM export, 3D preview, BOM management, and unlimited private projects for $1200 per seat per year.

Hackaday has taken a look at Upverter before in an book-length series of posts describing how to build a PCB in every software tool. While Upverter is a web-based PCB …read more

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Hackaday Links: August 27, 2017

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Hulk Hands! Who remembers Hulk Hands? These were a toy originally released for the 2003 Hulk movie and were basically large foam clenched fists you could wear. Hulk Hands have been consistently been re-released for various Marvel films, but now there’s something better: it’s the stupidest tool ever. Two guys thought it would be fun and not dangerous at all to create cast iron Hulk Hands and use them as demolition and renovation equipment. This is being sold as a tool comparable to a sledgehammer or a wrecking bar.

New Pogs! We’re up to 0x0C. Is your collection complete? …read more

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Casting Metal Directly Into 3D Printed Molds

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Casting metal and 3D printing go together like nuts and gum, and there are no shortage techniques that use the two together. Lost PLA casting is common, and sculptors are getting turned on to creating their works in plastic first before sending it off to the foundry. Now the folks at FormLabs have turned the whole ‘casting metal and 3D printer’ thing on its head: they’re printing sacrificial molds to cast pewter.

There are two techniques demonstrated in this tutorial, but the real winner here is printing a complete sacrificial mold for pewter miniatures. While this technique requires a little …read more

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Superconference Interview: Alan Yates

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In 2015, virtual reality was the future, which means we should all have it right now. One of the most technologically impressive VR sets is the HTC Vive, an amazing piece of kit that’s jam-packed with sensors and has some really cool tech going on inside it.

One of the developers of the HTC Vive and the ever-important ‘Lighthouse’ position sensors is [Alan Yates]. He’s of Valve and gave a talk at last year’s Superconference on Why the Lighthouse Can’t Work. Being able to determine the absolute position of the Valve’s headset is hard, but absolutely necessary for VR. Anything …read more

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Blinking LEDs on the Internet of Printers

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When you ask for recommendations on which 3D printer to buy, damn the cost, the Ultimaker is consistently at the top of the list. There’s a reason for the popularity of this printer — it’s easy to use, extremely high quality, and has an entire freakin’ Linux system running somewhere under the hood. That last bit is opening up a few doors to some interesting hacks, like using a 3D printer as an RGB LED.

The Doodle3D team has been playing around with the Ultimaker API to see if they can make their software work with the Ultimaker printer. The …read more

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