Collaborate Disseminate
If there’s anything more frustrating than mounting holes that don’t line up with the thing you’re mounting, we don’t know what it could be. You measure as carefully as possible, …read more Continue reading 3D Printed Caliper Extensions Make Hole Measurement Easier
We’ve started designing a PCIe card last week, an adapter from M.2 E-key to E-key, that adds an extra link to the E-key slot it carries – useful for fully …read more Continue reading PCIe For Hackers: Our M.2 Card Is Done
Now that it is relatively cheap and easy to create a PCB, it is a common occurrence for them to be used in projects. However, there are a lot of subtleties to creating high-performance boards that don’t show up so …read more
It’s no surprise that we here at Hackaday are big fans of Fritzing KiCad. But to a beginner (or a seasoned veteran!) the learning curve can be cliff-like in its severity. In 2016 we published a piece linking to project by friend-of-the-Hackaday [Chris Gammell] called Contextual Electronics, his project to …read more
A couple years ago I got into making electronic conferences badges by building a device for DEFCON 25 shaped like a dragonfly. Like all badges the most important design factor was quite literally how flashy it was, and two years ago I delivered on that with ten RGB LEDs. At the time I planned to hand-assemble each and every of the 105 badges at my kitchen table. Given those constraints, and a desire for electrical and programmatic simplicity, I landed on using APA102s (DotStar’s in Adafruit parlance) in the common 5050 sized package. They were easy to place, easy to …read more
One of the big problems with doing PCB layout is finding a suitable footprint for the components you want to use. Most tools have some library although — of course — some are better than others. You can often get by with using some generic footprint, too. That’s not handy for schematic layout, though, because you’ll have to remember what pin goes where. But if you can’t find what you are looking for SnapEDA is an interesting source of components available for many different layout tools. What really caught our eye though was a relatively new service they have that …read more
What’s your favorite value of resistor? 1K? 10K? They’re all fine, but when you need nearly no resistance at all, nothing beats the good old zero-ohm resistor.
Wait a minute! Resistors are supposed to resist current. What the heck does a zero-ohm resistor do? Well, the short story (tee-hee!) is that it’s like a jumper for single-sided surface-mount boards. In the bad old days, companies used to save money by running single-sided boards, and you could buy wire jumpers to help make the layout that much easier.
Fast forward to the modern era, where there’s not a through-hole component to …read more
[Gal Pavlin] admits to enjoying the occasional dance music show. For those who have never been to one, LED one-upmanship at these shows is a real and terrible thing, so much so that an entire market exists around it. To that end, [Gal] built a pretty spiffy set of LED glasses.
It took quite a bit of work to arrive at the final design. All the circuitry and LEDs fit entirely within the envelope of the lenses on a pair of sunglass frames of dubious parentage. The batteries squeeze in between the user’s head and temples.
On top of the …read more
Continue reading LED Matrix Shades You Can Actually See Though
One can imagine a political or business conference without an interactive badge — but not a hacker conference. Does this make the case for hackers being a special breed of people, always having something creative to show for their work? Yes, I think it does.
Following the Hackaday Belgrade conference in April of this year, we met at the Supplyframe offices to discuss the badge for the Hackaday SuperConference that will happen in Pasadena on 5+6th of November. The Belgrade conference badge (which was fully documented if you’re curious) was surprisingly popular, and I was asked to design the new …read more
Continue reading Design and Hacking Drilldown: SuperCon Badge
