Category Archives: square inch contest

Packing a Lot Into a Little PCB: Winners of the Square Inch Project

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It is mind-boggling when you think about the computing power that fits in the palm of your hand these days. It wasn’t long ago when air-conditioned rooms with raised floors hosted computers far less powerful that filled the whole area. Miniaturization is certainly the order of the day. Things are getting smaller every day, too. We were so impressed with the minuscule entries from the first “Square Inch Project” — a contest challenging designers to use 1 inch2 of PCB or less — that we decided bring it back with the Return of the Square Inch Project. The rules …read more

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Packing 10 into 1: A Square Inch Dekatron Replacement

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One of the things that always attracts our eye in old movies is how many kinds of displays you see on old gear both real and imaginary. Really old stuff usually had meters or circular recorders. But slightly newer movies often had some kind of exotic digital display with Nixes or Numitron tubes. One of the really exotic display devices was a Dekatron. While these are pretty rare, you can make a stand-in using modern LEDs and [Dave] did just that in an entry into our square inch competition.

These were gas-filled tubes with ten positions. You had to reset …read more

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Less is More: A Micromatrix Display in a Square Inch

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In your living room, the big display is what you want. But in an embedded project, often less is more. We think [bobricius] will agree since he submitted a tiny 4×5 LED display into our square inch challenge. The board features an ATtiny CPU and twenty SMD LEDs in a nice grid. You can see them in action, scrolling to some disco music in the video below.

There is plenty of room left in the CPU for bigger text strings — the flash memory is just over 10% full. A little side-mounted header makes it easy to program the chip …read more

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The Square-Inch Project Rides Again!

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Want to play a game? Your challenge is to do something incredible with a printed circuit board that measures no more than one inch by one inch. It’s The Return of the One Square Inch Project and it’s going to be amazing!

We can’t believe that it’s been three years! The original One Square Inch Project was a contest dreamt up by Hackaday.io user [alpha_ninja] back in 2015, and we thought it was such a great idea that we ponied up some prizes. The entries were, frankly, the best we’ve ever seen. So we’re doing it again!

Last time around, …read more

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