Collaborate Disseminate
About a month ago, [Unexpected Maker] finished their TinyS3, an ESP32-S3 development board. Since the chip supports both true USB and Bluetooth, [deʃhipu] wondered how well it would work in …read more Continue reading Keebin’ with Kristina: the One with the Really Tall Keycaps
Yes, circuit sculptures are amazing. But the patience and skill required puts most of the designs we’ve seen fairly far out of reach of the average beginner. We totally understand — not everyone finds fun in fiddly, structural soldering.
[Hari Wiguna] was captivated by the LED ball that [Jiří Praus] …read more
Rotary encoders are critical to many applications, even at the hobbyist level. While considering his own rotary encoding needs for upcoming projects, it occurred to [Jan Mrázek] to try making his own DIY capacitive rotary encoder. If successful, such an encoder could be cheap and very fast; it could also in part be made directly on a PCB.
The encoder design [Jan] settled on was to make a simple adjustable plate capacitor using PCB elements with transparent tape as the dielectric material. This was used as the timing element for a 555 timer in astable mode. A 555 in this …read more
Continue reading DIY Capacitive Rotational Encoder on the Cheap with FR4
Over on Hackaday.io, [bobricius] took this technology and designed something great. It’s a GSM cell phone with a case made out of FR4. It’s beautiful, and if you’re ever in need of a beautifully crafted burner phone, this is the one to build.
The components, libraries, and toolchains to build a cellphone from scratch have been around for a very long time. Several years ago, the MIT Media Lab prototyped a very simple cellphone on a single piece of FR4. It made calls, but not much else. It was ugly, but it worked. [Bobricius] took the idea and ran with …read more
