Collaborate Disseminate
Swedish e-mobility company Cake is looking cut back or cut out the plastic used in the manufacture of its electric motorcycles, and has partnered with PaperShell to evaluate the use of its natural fiber composite instead.Continue ReadingCategory: Motor… Continue reading Cake investigates replacing plastic components with paper
The ideal component tester is like a tricorder for electronics — it can measure whatever it is that you need it to, all the time. Maybe you have a few devices like an ohmmeter and maybe a transistor socket on our multimeter. But what do you do when you need …read more
It’s not hard for bad actors to track or hack your phone. But put it inside a Faraday pouch and you can drop off the digital map. Continue reading Get Lost With a Signal-Blocking Smartphone Pouch
We rarely take a moment to consider the beauty of the components we use in electronic designs. Too often they are simply commodities, bought in bulk on reels or in bags, stashed in a drawer until they’re needed, and then unceremoniously soldered to a board. Granted, little scraps of black …read more
Continue reading Components Cut in Half Reveal their Inner Beauty
KiCad, the open source EDA software, is popular with Hackaday readers and the hardware community as a whole. But it is not immune from the most common bane of EDA tools. Managing your library of symbols and footprints, and finding new ones for components you’re using in your latest design is rarely a pleasant experience. Swooping in to help alleviate your pain, [twitchyliquid64] has created KiCad Database (KCDB). a beautifully simple web-app for searching component footprints.
The database lets you easily search by footprint name with optional parameters like number of pins. Of course it can also search by tag …read more
Continue reading Searchable KiCad Component Database Makes Finding Parts A Breeze
When your widgets have proven so successful that building them gets to be a grind, it might be time to consider a little mechanical help in the form of a pick and place machine (PnP). If you’re going to roll your own though, there’s a lot to think about, not the least of which is how to feed your beast with parts.
Managing the appetite of a PnP is the idea behind this custom modular parts feeder, but the interesting part of [Hans Jørgen Grimstad]’s work-in-progress project has more to do with the design process. The feeders are to support …read more
Continue reading Custom Parts Feeder Aims to Keep Pace with Pick and Place
[Lucid Science] shows us how to make some simple reed switches. Reed switches are simple components that detect a magnetic field and can close or open a circuit once detected. While not really a thing of beauty, these DIY reed switches should help you out if you just can’t wait to order some or you fancied trying your hands at making some components from scratch.
Reed switches normally come in very small form factors so if you need something small then this may not be for you however the video does show you on a macro scale the fundamental workings …read more
