Collaborate Disseminate
Out of curiosity, I redrew the Supercon Vectorscope badge schematics in KiCad last year. As you might suspect, going from PCB to schematic is opposite to the normal design flow …read more Continue reading Supercon 2024 Flower SAO Badge Redrawing in KiCad
The software and hardware worlds have overlaps, and it’s worth looking over the fence to see if there’s anything you missed. You might’ve already noticed that we hackers use PCB …read more Continue reading Hacker Tactic: Building Blocks
Welcome to the Design Review Central! [VE3SVF] sends us their board, and it’s a HAB (High Altitude Balloon) tracker board. It’s got the venerable ATMega28P on it, a LoRa modem …read more Continue reading PCB Design Review: HAB Tracker With ATMega328P
A discussion came up on the Hackaday Discord PCB design channel about resistor networks, and it got me thinking about whether we (the hacker community) use them in designs or …read more Continue reading Too Much Over-optimization is Never Enough!
As both beginning hackers and Silicon Valley investors alike keep discovering, there are a lot of differences between hardware and software. One important difference is cost of iterating over a …read more Continue reading Check Your Board: Call For Submissions
When I saw this year’s Supercon Vectorscope badge, I decided that I had to build one for myself. Since I couldn’t attend in-person, I immediately got the PCBs and parts …read more Continue reading Vectorscope KiCad Redrawing Project
It’s like Star Wars versus Star Trek at a SciFi convention, or asking creamy or chunky at the National Peanut Butter Appreciation Festival. (OK, we made that one up.) When …read more Continue reading Try It Out
Nearly three years ago at the start of 2020 and before the pandemic hit, we took a look at an up-and-coming player in the world of PCB design. LibrePCB is …read more Continue reading Review: LibrePCB Hits Version 1.0
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
If you’ve done any amount of electronic design work, you’ll be familiar with the need for decoupling capacitors. Sometimes a chip’s datasheet will tell you exactly what kind of caps …read more Continue reading Clever Test Rig Clarifies Capacitor Rules-of-Thumb