Collaborate Disseminate
In the world of cheap amateur radio transceivers, the Quansheng UV-K5 can’t be beaten for hackability. But pretty much every hack we’ve seen so far focuses on the firmware. What …read more Continue reading Reverse Engineering the Quansheng Hardware
If you’re like us, there’s a creeping feeling that comes over you when you’re placing an order for parts for your latest project: Don’t I already have most of this …read more Continue reading EcoEDA Integrates Your Junk Bin into Your Designs
Hardware is hard, manufacturing only happens in China, accurate pricing is a dark art. Facts which are Known To Be True. And all things which can be hard to conquer as an independent hardware company, especially if you want to subvert the tropes. You may have heard of [Spencer Wright] …read more
Continue reading The Price of Domestic Just In Time Manufacturing
We’ve all been there; you finally get the last DigiKey box and now your desk is covered in parts to stuff into a shiny new PCB you’ve been working on. First stop? Passive town, population endless waves of 1uF capacitors. The first one goes in the upper left, then a little below that, then… once you get to C157 it’s getting pretty hard to remember exactly which parts go where. Enter the literally named InteractiveHtmlBom (IHB) to smooth this process out.
IHB makes the frustrating task of mapping lines in a BOM to a physical position on a board easy. …read more
Continue reading Interactive KiCAD BOMs Make Hand Assembly a Breeze
There are many ways to divide the hacker community into groups. Tubes vs transistors. Emacs vs VI, microcontroller vs discrete component designers. However, one of the more fundamental divisions in the community is how you organize your parts. We’ve seen giant warehouses with carefully organized bins and cabinets full of components, and we’ve seen storage crates with tangles of wires and bits of electron-bending components scattered among the wires.
If you are in the former camp, you’d probably enjoy partsbox.io (see image, right). If you are in the latter group, you probably need to check it out even more than …read more
Continue reading Partsbox.io Wants to Organize Your Junk Box
If the trends are anything to go on, after the success of Fitbit we are nearing a sort of fitness tracker singularity. Soon there will be more fitness trackers on wrists and ankles then there will be stars in the sky. We will have entire generations who will grow up not knowing what life is like without the ever-present hug of a heart monitor strapped across their chest. Until then though, we can learn a bit of design for manufacture from this excellent teardown of a watch shaped fitness tracker.
This tracker has a nice round e-paper screen, which could …read more
Continue reading Fitness Tracker Teardown is a Lesson In Design for Manufacture
KiCAD remains a popular tool for designing PCBs and other circuits, and with good reason: it’s versatile and it’s got pretty much everything needed to build any type of circuit board you’d want. It also comes with a pretty steep learning curve, though, and [Jeff] was especially frustrated with the bill of materials (BOM) features in KiCAD. After applying some Python and Kivy, [Jeff] now has a BOM manager that makes up for some of KiCAD’s shortcomings.
Currently, the tool handles schematic import, like-component consolidation, and a user-managed parts database that can be used to store and retrieve commonly used …read more
