Collaborate Disseminate
I recently had the opportunity to purchase an early version of a new display, and it happened to be just the thing I needed to make a project work. That …read more Continue reading New Part Day: Flush-mount Touchscreen For Retro PC Build
[Nick Poole] has an interesting idea for a new tool, one that has the simple goal of making accurate part counts of SMT reels as easy as pulling tape through …read more Continue reading SMT Part Counter Aims to Ease Taking Inventory
How better to work on Open Source projects than to use a Libre computing device? But that’s a hard goal to accomplish. If you’re using a desktop computer than Libre software is achievable, thought keeping your entire software stack free of closed source binary blobs might require a little extra …read more
Join us on Wednesday, July 24th at noon Pacific for the Crowd Supply Hack Chat with Josh Lifton!
When you’re ready to take your Next Big Idea from a project to a product, you face problems that don’t normally present themselves to the hobbyist. Building one of something is quite …read more
OpenSCAD has been updated. The latest release of what is probably the best 3D modeling tool has been in the works for years now, and we’ve got some interesting features now. Of note, there’s a customizer, for allowing parametrizing designs with a GUI. There’s 3D mouse support, so drag out …read more
Soft robotics is an exciting field. Mastering the pneumatic control of pliable materials has enormous potential, from the handling of delicate objects to creating movement with no moving parts. However, pneumatics has long been overlooked by the hacker community as a mode of actuation. There are thousands of tutorials, tools …read more
Continue reading Bringing Pneumatics To The Masses With Open Source Soft Robotics
The Chicago Pile led to the Manhattan Project, which led to the atomic bomb. In Germany, there were similar efforts with less success, and now we have physical evidence from the first attempted nuclear reactor in Germany. In Physics Today, there’s a lovely historical retrospective of one of the …read more
We’ve seen [Johan]’s AA-battery-sized Arduino/battery crossover before, but soon (we hope!) there will be a new version with more MIPS in the same unique form factor! The original Aarduino adhered to classic Arduino part choices and was designed to run as the third “cell” in a 3 cell battery holder to relay temperature readings via a HopeRF RFM69CW. But as [Johan] noticed, it turns out that ARM development tools are cheap now. In some cases very cheap and very open source. So why not update an outstanding design to something with a little more horsepower?
The Aarduino Zero uses the …read more
We’ve seen [Johan]’s AA-battery-sized Arduino/battery crossover before, but soon (we hope!) there will be a new version with more MIPS in the same unique form factor! The original Aarduino adhered to classic Arduino part choices and was designed to run as the third “cell” in a 3 cell battery holder to relay temperature readings via a HopeRF RFM69CW. But as [Johan] noticed, it turns out that ARM development tools are cheap now. In some cases very cheap and very open source. So why not update an outstanding design to something with a little more horsepower?
The Aarduino Zero uses the …read more
When you’re debugging two bits of electronics talking SPI to each other, there’s a lot that can go sideways. Starting from the ground up, the signals can be wrong: data not synced with clocks right, or phase inverted. On top of that, the actual data sent needs to make sense to the receiving device. Are you sending the right commands?
When nothing’s working, you’re fighting simultaneously on these two fronts and you might need different tools to debug each. An oscilloscope works great at the physical layer, while something like a Bus Pirate or fancier logic analyzer works better at …read more