Category Archives: skills

Create a Discord Webhook with Python for Your Bot

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Discord is an IRC-like chat platform that all the young cool kids are hanging out on. Originally intended as a way to communicate during online games, Discord has grown to the point that there are servers out there for nearly any topic imaginable. One of the reasons for this phenomenal growth is how easy it is to create and moderate your own Discord server: just hit the “+” icon on the website or in the mobile application, and away you go.

As a long-time IRC guy, I was initially unimpressed with Discord. It seemed like the same kind of stuff …read more

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Create a Discord Webhook with Python for Your Bot

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Discord is an IRC-like chat platform that all the young cool kids are hanging out on. Originally intended as a way to communicate during online games, Discord has grown to the point that there are servers out there for nearly any topic imaginable. One of the reasons for this phenomenal growth is how easy it is to create and moderate your own Discord server: just hit the “+” icon on the website or in the mobile application, and away you go.

As a long-time IRC guy, I was initially unimpressed with Discord. It seemed like the same kind of stuff …read more

Continue reading Create a Discord Webhook with Python for Your Bot→

OpenSCAD: Tieing It Together With Hull()

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What’s your favorite OpenSCAD command? Perhaps it’s intersection() or difference()? Or are you a polygon() and extrude() modeler? For me, the most useful, and maybe most often overlooked, function is hull(). Hull() does just what it says on the can — creates a convex hull around the objects that are passed to it as children — but that turns out to be invaluable.

Hull() solves a number of newbie problems: making things round and connecting things together. And with a little ingenuity, hull() can provide a nearly complete modelling strategy all on its own. If you use OpenSCAD …read more

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Printed It: Do More with Lockable Ball And Socket Helping Hands

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In one hand you hold the soldering iron, in the other the solder, and in two more hands the parts you’re trying to solder together. Clearly this is a case where helping hands could be useful.

Luckily helping hands are easy to make, coolant hoses will do the job at under $10. Attach alligator clips to one end, mount them on some sort of base, and you’re done. Alternatively, you can steal the legs from an “octopus” tripod normally used for cell phones. So why would you 3D print them?

One reason is to take advantage of standardized, open source …read more

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3D Printering: Printing Sticks for a PLA Hot Glue Gun

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When is a hot glue stick not a hot glue stick? When it’s PLA, of course! A glue gun that dispenses molten PLA instead of hot glue turned out to be a handy tool for joining 3D-printed objects together, once I had figured out how to print my own “glue” sticks out of PLA. The result is a bit like a plus-sized 3D-printing pen, but much simpler and capable of much heavier extrusion. But it wasn’t quite as simple as shoving scrap PLA into a hot glue gun and mashing the trigger; a few glitches needed to be ironed out. …read more

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Printed It: Rubber Band PCB Vise

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If you’ve ever worked on a small PCB, you know how much of a hassle it can be to hold on to the thing. It’s almost as if they weren’t designed to be held in the grubby mitts of a human. As designs have become miniaturized over time, PCBs are often so fragile and festooned with components that tossing them into the alligator clips of the classic soldering “third hand” can damage them. The proper tool for this job is a dedicated PCB vise, which is like a normal bench vise except it doesn’t crank down very hard and usually …read more

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Custom Alexa Skill in a Few Minutes Using Glitch

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As hackers, we like to think of ourselves as a logical bunch. But the truth is, we are as subject to fads as the general public. There was a time when the cool projects swapped green LEDs out for blue ones or added WiFi connectivity where nobody else had it. Now all the rage is to connect your project to a personal assistant. The problem is, this requires software. Software that lives on a publicly accessible network somewhere, and who wants to deal with that when you’re just playing with custom Alexa skills for the first time?

If you have …read more

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5 Things We Need from ACL in 2018

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Here’s the 5 things I’m hoping will change in 2018 regarding ACL. They are all related to each other and feed off each other… Interesting. One) The ACL Analytics user interface (UI) finds a good plastic surgeon. While I have crit… Continue reading 5 Things We Need from ACL in 2018→

Software Design Patterns for Real Hardware

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Here on Hackaday, we’re generally designers of hacks that live in the real world. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that some of the most interesting feats are at the mercy of what’s possible in software, not hardware. Without the right software, no 3D printer could print and no quadcopter could fly. The source code that drives these machines may take months of refinement to flesh out their structure. In a nutshell, these software packages are complicated, and they don’t happen overnight.

So how do they happen; better yet: how could we make that happen? How do we write software that’s flexible enough …read more

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You Got a 3D Printer, Now What?

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Given the incredibly low prices on some of the models currently on the market, it’s more than likely a number of Hackaday readers have come out of the holiday season with a shiny new desktop 3D printer. It’s even possible some of you have already made the realization that 3D printing is a bit harder than you imagined. Sure the newer generation of 3D printers make it easier than ever, but it’s still not the same “click and forget” experience of printing on paper, for instance.

In light of this, I thought it might be nice to start off the …read more

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