Author Archives: Mike Szczys

Interview: Nacer Chahat Designs Antennas for Mars CubeSats

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You have a shoe box sized computer that you want to use in a Mars fly by. How do you communicate with it? The answer is a very clever set of antennas. I got to sit down with Nacer Chahat, one of the engineers on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory team responsible for antenna design on Mars Cube One (MarCO). Two of these CubeSats that will soon be used to help a lander reach Mars. We talked about the work that went into MarCO, the deployable radar antenna he’s worked on for the RainCube project, and the early progress on OMERA, …read more

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SPI On Embedded Linux

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Are you already comfortable working with Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) parts and looking for a challenge? We suspect many of you have cut your teeth on 8-bit through 32-bit microcontrollers but how much time have you spent playing with hardware interfaces on embedded Linux? Here a new quest, should you choose to accept it. [Matt Porter] spoke in detail about the Linux SPI Subsystem during his presentation at FOSDEM 2017. Why not grab an embedded Linux board and try your hand at connecting some extra hardware to one of the SPI buses?

The hardware side of this is exactly what …read more

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Hackaday.io Passes 200,000 Registered Users

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Hackaday.io just welcomed the 200,000th registered user! We are the world’s largest repository of open hardware projects and Hackaday.io is proving its worth as the world’s most vibrant technology community. This is where you go to get inspiration for your next project, to get help fleshing out your product ideas, to build your engineering dream team, and to tell the tales of the workbench whether that be success, failure, or anything in between.

Over the past six months, as we’ve grown from the 150k member milestone to this one, our movement has enjoyed ever-increasing interaction among this amazing group of …read more

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Robot Leaps Uncanny Valley on Backward Knees

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We’ve covered a ton of Boston Dynamics robots but this is the second one in a row that has shown a departure from what a lot of people’s notion of an ‘advanced’ robot should look like. It’s a cellphone camera clip of a video played at a conference, but at least it isn’t vertical video — kudos to [juvertson]. At about 3:40 seconds into the video you get a good look “Handle” at a four-limbed robot with backwards joints and wheel.

This design makes a lot of sense and it’s good to see Boston Dynamics thinking about unique robot kinematics …read more

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Jamming WiFi by Jumping on the ACK

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As we fill our airwaves with more and more wirelessly connected devices the question of what could disrupt this systems becomes more and more important. Here’s a particularly interesting example because the proof of concept shows that you don’t need specialized hardware to pull it off. [Bastian Bloessl] found an interesting tweak to previous research that allows an Atheros WiFi card to jam WiFi by obscuring ACK frames.

The WiFi protocol specifies an Acknowledgement Frame (ACK) which is sent by the receiving device after error correction has been performed. It basically says: “yep, I got that data frame and it …read more

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Ask Hackaday: Are Unlockable Features Good for the User?

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There are numerous examples of hardware which has latent features waiting to be unlocked by software. Most recently, we saw a Casio calculator which has the same features as its bigger sibling hidden within the firmware, only to be exposed by a buffer overflow bug (or the lead from a pencil if you prefer a hardware hack).

More famously, oscilloscopes have been notorious for having crippled features. The Rigol DS1052E was hugely popular on hacker benches because of it’s very approachable price tag. The model shipped with 50 MHz bandwidth but it was discovered that a simple hack turned it …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: CircuitPython with Adafruit Engineers

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What the heck is CircuitPython? Get that question answered along with many more during this Friday’s Hack Chat. Three engineers from Adafruit join us as [Ladyada], [Tony DiCola], and [Scott Shawcoft] lead a CircuitPython discussion at Noon PST on 1/27/17.

CircuitPython is Adafruit’s new extension on the MicroPython codebase. It adds support for SAMD21 processors in MicroPython and reworks the API for better support across platforms and better documentation. Does this still sound like jibberish? The Python programming language has been extended to microcontrollers. CircuitPython is furthering that work and this Hack Chat is the perfect opportunity to talk with …read more

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Heavy Metal Chess

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Chess is a slow game of careful decision-making, looking several moves ahead of the current state of the board. So is machining, and combining the two is an excellent way to level up your machine shop chops. And so we have the current project from [John Creasey] who is machining a chess set out of stainless steel.

This isn’t that new-fangled computer numerical control at work, it’s the time-tested art of manual machining. Like chess, you need to plan several steps ahead to ensure you have a way to mount the part for each progressive machining process. In this first …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: KiCad EDA Suite with Wayne Stambaugh

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KiCad is the premiere open source electronics design automation suite. It’s used by professionals and amateurs alike to design circuits and layout out printed circuit boards. In recent years we’ve seen some incredible features added to KiCad like an improved 3D viewer and push-and-shove routing. This Friday at 10 am PST, join in a Hack Chat with KiCad lead developer [Wayne Stambaugh] to talk about recent improvements and what the team has planned for KiCad in the future.

[Wayne] has been an electronics engineer for over 30 years with a wide range of experience in analog and digital hardware design …read more

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Sophi Kravitz: State of the IO

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At the Hackaday SuperConference in November, Sophi Kravitz had the chance to look back on the past year of Hackaday.io, and what a great year it has been. Hackaday.io now has over 178k members who have published 12.6k projects with about 10% of those being collaborative team projects. But the numbers tell just a small story of the vibrant community Hackaday has.

The Hackaday crew made a trip to the desert to begin 2016. This resulted in the Hackaday Prize video which launched the engineering initiative which wrapped up with the awards ceremony at SuperCon. The video launched the 2016 …read more

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