Collaborate Disseminate
What’s the worst thing about traditional Morse keyers? If you ask us, it’s the fact that you have to learn how to do two distinct things with one hand, and …read more Continue reading A Toe-Tappin’ Set of Morse Code Pedals
Amateur Radio as a hobby has a long history of encouraging experimentation using whatever one might have on hand. When [Tom Essenpreis] wanted to use his 14 MHz antenna outside …read more Continue reading Surplus Syringes Make Satisfactory Tuner for Amateur Radio Experimentation
It all started when [Damien Walsh] got his hands on some surplus LED boards. Each panel contained 100 mini-PCBs hosting a single bright LED that were meant to be to be snapped apart as need. [Damien] had a much better idea: leave them in their 20×5 array and design a …read more
Continue reading Rolling Your Own LED Matrix Driver, With Copper Foil Tape to the Rescue
The idea of trying to prototype with SMD parts on the fly sounds like insanity, right? But then we watched [Leo Fernekes] walk calmly and carefully through his process (video, embedded below). Suddenly, SMD prototyping jumped onto our list of things to try soon.
[Leo] speaks from a lot of …read more
We don’t know about you, but we’re pretty tired of singing two rounds of “Happy Birthday” or counting Mississippi to 20 each time we wash our hands. It’s difficult to do it without thinking about the reason why, and that’s not good for positivity. If you’d rather have your spirits …read more
What’s the worst thing about winter? If you’re as indoorsy as we are, then static electricity is probably pretty high on the list. It can ruin your chips, true, but you always wear a wrist ground strap when you handle those, right? But away from the bench, every doorknob and …read more
Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams sort through the hacks you might have missed over the past seven days. In FPGA hacking news, there’s a ton of work being done on a newly discovered FPGA dev board. Kristina has a new column on input devices, kicking it off with …read more
Somewhere between shoving components into a breadboard temporarily and committing them to a piece of protoboard or a PCB lies the copper tape method. This flexible Manhattan-style method of circuitry formed the basis for [Bunnie Huang]’s Chibitronics startup, and has since inspired many to stop etching boards and start fetching …read more
Continue reading The Flexible Permanence of Copper Tape Circuits
Some folks bring out an heirloom table runner when they have company, but what if you sewed your own and made it musical? We’d never put it away! [kAi CHENG] has an Instructable about how to recreate his melodic material, and there is a link to his website, which describes …read more
Let’s face it, breadboarding can be frustrating, even for advanced electronics wizards. If you have an older board, you could be dealing with loose tie points left from large component legs, and power rails of questionable continuity. Conversely, it can be hard to jam just-made jumper wires into new boards …read more
Continue reading Magnetic Circuits Are More Attractive Than Breadboarding