From OSHWA president Michael Weinberg:

How We Made the Open Hardware Summit All Virtual in Less Than a Week

First, thank you again to everyone – speakers, participants, and sponsors – for a fantastic 10th anniversary Open Hardware Summit.  We knew the 10th anniversary Summit would be one for the ages, although we didn’t quite expect it to be because it became the first virtual Summit.
Thanks to the timing of the Summit, the 10th anniversary Summit ended up being many people’s first virtual summit of the Covid-19 era (that includes the organizers).  Unfortunately it looks like it is unlikely to be the last. In the hopes of helping event organizers struggling with the same challenges, this blog post outlines the decisions we made and the steps we took to make it happen.

Quick Context

The Open Hardware Summit is an annual gathering of the open source hardware community held by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA).  This year OSHWA partnered with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law to host the event in New York City.  The event usually brings together hundreds of community members and speakers from around the world.  It was scheduled for March 13, 2020.
While the situation has been evolving for some time, as recently as March 5th (8 days before the Summit) we thought that holding a reduced in-person version of the event was the right decision.  By March 8 (5 days before the Summit) that was no longer tenable and we announced that the Summit was going all virtual.  That was the right decision, but what does going all virtual mean?

Priorities

We had two major priorities for the virtual Summit:

1. Online streaming video of all of the speakers and panels.
2. A community space for discussions and coming together.

Video

The live stream of the Summit had to be both accessible to our viewers and easy to join for our speakers and panelists.  After considering some options and consulting with experts in our community (huge thank you to Phil Torrone at Adafruit for the guidance), we concluded that a combination of YouTube and StreamYard would be the best option.
YouTube worked for our community because it is easily accessible on a wide range of platforms in most of the world.  That meant that just about everyone would be able to see the Summit from wherever they were.
StreamYard made it easy to manage the backend.  Speakers could join a virtual green room before their talk and our technical testing the day before the Summit made it clear that it was easy for them to share their slide presentations as well.  One of the members of the Summit team was able to easily add and remove people (and their screens) to the live feed, along with stills and slides for introductions, sponsors, and everything else.

Community Space

We also looked at a number of options for online discussions.  We decided that a discord server would be the best option for the open source hardware community. Discord allowed us to open the space to anyone who wanted to join, while at the same time giving us moderation control over the discussion (huge thank you for Lenore Edman from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories for jumping in as a moderator).  Many community members were already comfortable with discord, which was also a bonus.
We also decided to use discord for a version of Q&A for the speakers.  One option would have been to try and integrate video questions from the audience into the live stream. That would have been technically possible with StreamYard (probably…), but it seemed like an unnecessary logistical complication for the organizers.  As an alternative we decided to set up separate discord channels for each of the speakers. That allowed the speakers to end their talk and move to their discord channel for further discussions.
One unexpected and welcome development was that the discord server grew into a larger...

Read more

Due to the COVID-19 virus, the Open Hardware Summit has been moved from NYC to cyberspace!

2020.oshwa.org

• The livestream link will be updated here on the day of the Summit (13th March 2020).  The event will be running in EST (New York) time zone.
• For Q&A/discussions, please join the OHS discord server: https://discord.gg/38C57Uf
• Follow OHSummit on Twitter and use hashtag #ohs2020Virtual
• The link to sign up for OSHWA email updates: http://eepurl.com/gVRYVz
• The link for the open hardware survey: https://nyu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_cGDMjnMBVtDqHXL
• The link to 2021 tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/open-hardware-summit-2021-tickets-99408361084

Here is the exciting schedule for the Open Hardware Summit on March 13th in NYC: 

Be sure to buy tickets before they are sold out!

After a successful first year of KiCon in 2019 in Chicago, it will change venues to CERN, a major contributor to the KiCad project!

KiCon 2020: A KiCad conference at CERN, September 11th-13th, 2020

More details soon!  If you’re interested in being involved, the following email addresses can be used to contact the right people about this event:

• Sponsorship: sponsors@kicad-kicon.com
• Media: media@kicad-kicon.com
• All other inquiries: help@kicad-kicon.com

@Alex Camilo has placed components and reflow soldered the first prototype board!

He will attempt to burn the boatloader tomorrow using a j-link:

https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-on-the-nrf52/nrf52840-bootloader

Join us for the Open Hardware Summit on March 13th in New York City:

https://2020.oshwa.org/

It will be the 10th anniversary and @Sophi Kravitz  will be giving a keynote. More speakers will be announced soon!

Tickets are on sale now:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/open-hardware-summit-2020-special-edition-10th-anniversary-tickets-65367109785

Thanks to @Anool Mahidharia for  posting on Hackaday about KiCad plugins.  I decided to try out the Teardrop plugin by NilujePerchut:

KiCad Teardrop Plugin

This action plugin adds and deletes teardrops to a PCB.
This implementation uses zones instead of arcs. This allows to comply with DRC rules by simply rebuild all zones. You can also modify their shape by simply modifying the zone outline (like any other zone). Teardrops created with this script use a specific priority (0x4242) to be recognized as teardrops.

Here is the result of my first experiment to use the Teardrop plugin on a flexible PCB to reduce the mechanical stress of flexing the trace:

The board is available as an OSH Park shared project and the KiCad design files are on GitHub.

The author of the plugin was very responsive to GitHub issues and I was able to get better results on my next flex design which is currently being manufactured:

My flex “business card” will fold over a coin cell battery to light a 0603 LED.

Curious how the plugin works?  It creates zones next to the vias and pads.  Here are the two teardrop zones that connect traces to a via:

Warning: you need create a schematic and generate a netlist before starting the PCB layout.  Otherwise the the zones the plugin creates won’t be filled:

You also need to be careful that there is not copper on the same layer too close to the zone.  For example, the text was too close to the teardrop zone on this via, so I moved the text down and the zone now fills correctly:

An open GitHub issue is that the teardrop zone does not align perfectly for SMD pads that are not circles (like rectangles, squares, rounded rectangles).  The work around I used was to move the zone after it is filled to align with my SMD pad:

I hope you have fun with this plugin and leave a comment if you use it your own design!

UPDATE: I joined Adafruit Show-n-Tell to talk about flex PCBs and the teardrop plugin at 10 min 51 sec mark

UPDATE: Here is my presentation from Berlin Hack 'n Tell on how support for the Hackaday badge was added to LiteX including a look at the Python source code in the pull requests:

• PDF
• SlideShare

UPDATE: This is a recording of Linux booting on the badge:

https://asciinema.org/a/293450

---

Jacob Creedon designed an a cartridge board that adds 32MB of SDRAM to the Hackaday Supercon badge.  Michael Welling just assembled a version of the PCB made with the OSH Park “After Dark” black FR-4 service:

The addition of SDRAM provides enough memory to boot Linux on a RISC-V soft-core in the ECP5 FPGA on the badge.  Here’s a screenshot of Linux running:

Read more about “Team Linux on Badge” in this Hackaday post:

A Fantastic Frontier Of FPGA Flexibility Found In The 2019 Supercon Badge

And finally, receiving the biggest applause was Linux-on-Badge: this team used all the badge hacking tricks in the book. The hardware component was a 32 MiB SDRAM cartridge by [Jacob Creedon]. The default badge SOC FPGA bitstream was entirely replaced in order to support a minimalist Linux. Much of the development was done on [Michael Welling]’s computer, guided by the precedence of a LiteX project putting Linux on the Radiona ULX3S. This is a true success story of Supercon collaboration as the team (including [Drew Fustini], [Tim Ansell], [Sean Cross], and many others) came together and worked late into nights, drawing from the massive body of collective expertise of the community.

Watch the demo during the Badge Hacking ceremony (jump to 17m 35s):

Resources:

• KiCad design files are available on GitHub: jcreedon/dram-cart

• Modification to LiteX for the FPGA to use the SDRAM: mwelling/litex-boards

• Shared project on OSH Park: Hackaday Supercon badge SDRAM cartridge

Kevin Neubauer has designed a System-on-Module (SoM) to run Circuit Python:

CircuitBrains Deluxe

I love Adafruit’s CircuitPython product line. The ability to just plug your board into USB, make code changes, and see them take effect in real-time is amazing. However, when it comes to finishing up a CircuitPython project, I felt limited in choice for a small form-factor, streamlined board. I always ended up creating my own boards. The overhead in doing this was huge though. You have to make sure your design has proper power, decoupling, and clock. Then you source all of the parts. After that you lay out the PCB and have it fabricated. When the PCB and parts arrive, you have to deal with finicky small-pitch surface mount assembly. Finally, you need to download the sources for the UF2 bootloader and CircuitPython and define your board, compile, and flash. This makes what should be a small project pretty time consuming and tedious!

WORK IN PROGRESS

- Wrist form factor like Chaos Camp watch?

https://firmware.card10.badge.events.ccc.de/index.html

- SparkFun Artemis... software support not ready?  talk to Owen?

- lessons learned: must have USB

  - use a usb-to-serial? 

   - CP2102 https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/silicon-labs/CP2102-GMR/336-1160-1-ND/3672615

- discussion with Nate and Michael and Drew:

  - wristwatch with sparkfun artemis

  - GPS, vibration motor, small IPS LCD 

- supercon meeting

   - maybe not use artemis

   - wireless uC ideas: ESP32, Rigado... Nordic NRF52840

    - do we really need wireless?  if not, then STM32 or SAMD

    - Nordic NRF52840 is well supported by adafruit

- GPS useful?  not really since indoors... BLE beacons might be more practicle

- Idea: reuse the card10 design

- note: here is a way to use stock wristband watch stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uib8nUV1JEg&feature=youtu.be&t=2010

- wristband from sparkfun: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11734

MUST HAVE:

- USB programmable (either builtin or usb-to-serial)

- Accel/IMU  6DoF of 3DoF

If throw on a 6dof e-compass we can get the magnetometer too:
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/stmicroelectronics/LSM303AGRTR/497-16527-1-ND/6006105

- Arduino library compatible

- Display LCD or OLED - source from Digi Key?  if from China, remember Chinese New Year

... or e-paper (Pervasive Display on DigiKey)

... flexible epaper?

- note: DOOM guy SAO has: High DPI ST7789 1.3" 240x240 LCD Screen

https://hackaday.io/project/164346-andxor-dc27-badge/log/165849-dc27-doom-sao-hurt-me-plenty

-  ST7789 1.3" 240x240 LCD  possible on DigiKey?

- V1.69bis standard SAO connector (have them on the wristband -- use flex?)

- POWER? 

   - LiPo from Sparkfun

    - note: card10 has 200mAh 

NICE TO HAVE:

- MicroPython or CircuitPython

   - note: Python may drain power on the NRF52840 (ask tannewt)

- BLE that works

SUMMARY: Nordic 82540 might be the best choice

There is a module from Rigado that Andy Sowa has used:

https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/u-blox-america-inc/BMD-340-A-R-00/672-BMD-340-A-R-00CT-ND/8638940

SOURCING CONCERNS:

- LCD 240x240

- Vibration motor

- watch strap / mount

Chris Gammell writes on the Contextual Electronics about the first ever user focused KiCad conference, which is happening April 26th and 27th 2019 in Chicago (USA):

KiCon 2019

As you may know, KiCad is a very big part of CE. We use it in every design we showcase on the CE site. We’re hoping that some of you will decide to take your learnings and share them at KiCon 2019. We’re looking for speakers to give talks about how they are using KiCad in their jobs, businesses and schooling. Or just how you use it for fun! Please apply to give a talk here! There are no requirements on how advanced you are as a user, so talks could be something like, “My perspective on getting started in KiCad”.

Please also consider attending! We’ll also have the opportunity to give feedback to developers and help brainstorm what else is needed for KiCad. Not only that, but we’ll be able to interact with other KiCad users and share tips and tricks. We’re also planning a layout contest and other fun interactive activities.
Not able to make it? Please help spread the word about KiCon! (Example tweet here, though any promotion is appreciated) In return, we promise to record and share the talks from the conference so you can view them later.
And finally, if your company has the means, please consider supporting KiCon as a sponsor.

Shared project by Rob Rehr (@mediumrehr) to connect Wii controllers to #badgelife add-on header:

Wii_SAO_gerbers

All the Open Hardware Summit 2018 talks are now available as individual videos on YouTube

The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) 2018-2020 Board Nominations are now open

OSHWA is looking for 6 new faces to join the board of directors for the Open Source Hardware Association. The nominee form is for self-nominations only.

Please fill out the nominee form (deactivated Nov. 4th) to become a nominee or forward the link to someone you want to nominate. Do not fill out the form for someone else. The purpose of this form is to tell voting members why you want to serve on the OSHWA board. We will be publish the nominees and their answers on Nov. 5th. Board members hold a 2-year position.

Once board members have been chosen by the community, the board will appoint a President, VP, and Secretary. Board responsibilities include fundraising, advising on goals and direction, and carry out compliance with the organizations purposes and bylaws. See the board member agreement to get a sense of the responsibilities. Board members are expected to adhere to the board attendance policy and come prepared having read the board packet. Board members are expected to spend 5-10 hours of time per month on OSHWA. Nominees can submit questions to info@oshwa.org. Nominations will be open until Nov. 4th.

Member voting will take place Nov. 8-12. Want to vote in the election? Become a member! Please note that only individuals can vote, corporate members cannot

If you’re in the Denver area, come meet our new assembly partner: Advanced Assembly!

They’re having an open house:

• When: Thursday, October 25th, 3:30 – 6:30 PM
• Where: 20100 E. 32nd Parkway, Suite 225, Aurora, CO 80016

Join us for pizza, beer and tours of our newly remodeled, high-tech facility as we celebrate 14 years in business. Bring your co-workers too!

Please RSVP

Updates for the 2018 Open Hardware Summit badge project:

MicroPython demo app for the Accelerometer

Want to use the KX122-1037 Accelerometer (datasheet) on the 2018 Open Hardware Summit badge?

USB-to-Serial adapter board

This adapter board to connects a USB-to-serial cable to the 2018 Open Hardware Summit badge.

Extra badges being sold on Tindie

The extra badges from the Summit are being sold here on Tindie as a fundraiser for the Ada Lovelace Fellowship which provides travel assistance to the Open Hardware Summit. All sales revenue will be 100% donated to the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) for this purpose.

If you’re in the Denver area, come meet our new assembly partner: Advanced Assembly!

They’re having an open house:

• When: Thursday, October 25th, 3:30 – 6:30 PM
• Where: 20100 E. 32nd Parkway, Suite 225, Aurora, CO 80016

Join us for pizza, beer and tours of our newly remodeled, high-tech facility as we celebrate 14 years in business. Bring your co-workers too!

Please RSVP

A set-and-forget I2C/digital datalogger from Jan on Hackaday.io

micropower micrologger [mPmL]

This is a logical development from my first and second logger projects. The idea is simple: The logger needs to be small enough to fit inside small spaces, e.g. a bee hive.

With the press off a button it starts/stops logging. The casing can be as simple as shrink tubing!

The annual Open Hardware Summit took place on September 27th at MIT, and all the exciting and insightful presentation were live streamed to YouTube!

The live stream is broken into morning session and afternoon session.

Morning schedule:

9:00 AM	Door Open!
10:00	Opening Remarks:  Michael Weinberg, OSHWA President
10:15	Eric Von Hippel: Economics of Open Hardware
10:45 AM	Surya Mattu: Approaching adversarial research
11:00	Oluwatobi Oyinlola: Hyperloop: The rLoop Journey
11:20	Sara Chipps: C++ API for Kids
11:35	Robin Getz: Open Source Software Defined Radio
11:55	Evan Raskob: Livecoding 3D printing: experiments in live computational sculpting
12:10	Adam Benzion: How to build a huge open source community (without being a total sellout). Mario Gómez : Building Resilience With Public Institutions and Open Hardware

Afternoon schedule:

1:45 PM	Neil Gershenfeld: How To Make (almost) Anything
2:20 PM	Joseph Apuzzo: MicroPython on ESP32 and LoBo
2:45 PM	Jodi Clark: OpenCosplay, Teaching the Next Generation
3:00 PM	SURPRISE SPEAKER YA’ALL
3:45 PM	Tarek Loubani: Gaza tourniquet: Making lifesaving medical devices under fire
4:00 PM	Stephanie Valencia: Creating a more accessible future with OSH
4:15 PM	Amitabh Shrivastava: Programmable-Air
4:30 PM	Ted Hayes: How to Put A Neural Network on an Arduino and Why
4:45 PM	Closing Remarks: Alicia Gibb, OSHWA Director

If you enjoyed these talks, please consider joining the Open Source Hardware Association (OSWHA)!

And follow Open Hardware Summit on Twitter for update on 2019 – we’ll be in China!

Thanks to @Steve Pomeroy for creating this MicroPython demo app for the Open Hardware Summit badge:

ohs18apps/magic8ball.py

This Python file can be transferred to Open Hardware Summit badge using the FTP server built into the MicroPython firmware.

Visit this gallery for more photos and screenshots.  Join this project on Hackaday.io if you are interested in participating in the development.

The next Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago is Wednesday, October 10th, at Haymarket Pub!

This group is based upon the idea that you are interested in hanging out and discussing hardware. Please bring a piece of hardware to show off or talk about. Are you interested in hardware, but you haven’t built anything yet? Show off software you have built! Or come prepared to talk about the projects you want to build.

There are no organized talks, it’s literally a show and tell at a bar or restaurant. In case you missed it two paragraphs ago, bring hardware. Seriously, just bring anything to talk about 

This weekend at World Maker Faire New York:

Building Radical Haptics by Noah Feehan

LOCATION: Zone 3 in Make: Electronics by Digi-Key
TIME: Saturday, September 22, 2:30 pm – 2:45 pm
Add weird, changeable textures to your next project with the WEFT electrovibration library and dev board.
We’ll go over the fundamentals behind the texture effect, how the circuit is built, and how best to design textures and electrodes for working with this radical haptics technology.
WEFT project website

This Friday evening before Maker Faire New York:

#BringAHack New York with BeagleBoard.org before Maker Faire

To celebrate our 10 year anniversary and our love of cool hardware hacks, join us for a #BringAHack event in the Big Apple! Join BeagleBoard.org for a casual evening of drinks, snacks and hacks at the Leaf Bar the night before Maker Faire New York.

DATE AND TIME

Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:00 PM –

Sat, Sep 22, 2018, 1:00 AM EDT

Add to Calendar

LOCATION

Leaf Bar & Lounge

133-42 39th Ave, Roof

Queens, NY 11354

View Map

From Nicholas Junker on Hackaday.io

Micro TV-B-Gone

The Micro TV-B-Gone is based off of Adafruit’s original TV-B-Gone kit, except made to be as small as possible, using an LIR-2032 coin cell.

I based this project off of the Adafruit TV-B-Gone kit. I wanted to start getting into using surface mount components on my projects, and seeing as the TV-B-Gone was my first foray into soldering, I figured that it would be a great project to work on.
The device takes a rechargeable LIR-2032 battery, and is activated pressing the single button on top. It will run through all TV power codes, and then go into a low power mode, waiting for the next button press. The battery will last around 40 full cycles, before being reduced down to 3.5 volts

The 100th Dorkbot SF is TONIGHT, June 27th, at DNA Lounge in San Francisco! 

Come to the 100th #dorkbotsf #dbsf100 at DNA – see Heather Gold Evo Heyning Julian Cash Chris Korda presentations, comedy, free pizza while they last! If you’re into AI, interactive immersive media, light painting and a cool synthesizer for pottery come celebrate with us!

Did you know that OSH Park grew out of the Dorkbot PDX (Portland) meetup?

Find a Dorkbot near you!

The 100th Dorkbot SF is TONIGHT, June 27th, at DNA Lounge in San Francisco! 

Come to the 100th #dorkbotsf #dbsf100 at DNA – see Heather Gold Evo Heyning Julian Cash Chris Korda presentations, comedy, free pizza while they last! If you’re into AI, interactive immersive media, light painting and a cool synthesizer for pottery come celebrate with us!

Did you know that OSH Park grew out of the Dorkbot PDX (Portland) meetup?

Find a Dorkbot near you!

Open Source Linear Actuator from Carl Bugeja on Hackaday.io:

Inspired from my pcb motor project, this project is aimed to make a very thin low-torque linear pcb actuator.

The coils of this motors are made from 5/5mil coreless pcb windings. A 3d-printed rig with magnets is used to slide across the pcb and is actuated by the winding’s magnetic field.

All design files for this project are also open source\

Bradley Ramsey writes on the Tindie blog about this robotics kit from The Maker’s Box: 

Open Source Turtle Robot Kit Teaches Beginners & Creates Beautiful Art

The Open Source Turtle Robot (OSTR) was created as the basis for a two-day workshop where high school students could gain hands-on experience with engineering concepts. The finished robot even creates interesting pieces of art via pen plotting with Turtle graphics.

The project is Arduino compatible for ease of programming and powered by 4 AA batteries to make it cost effective. Stepper motors were chosen for accurate motion, and the parts were 3D printed for easy customization.

CrowdSupply shares a look back at Teardown hardware hacking con last month in Portland:

Teardown Retrospective

Whew, Teardown 2018 is over! Over 150 attendees from ten states and three countries were treated to a whirlwind of talks, workshops, presentations, and demos of all manner of unique, amazing, beautiful hardware projects, from art works to industry-changing technology. Held over three-days, May 11-13, in Portland, Oregon, we were lucky enough to partner with Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Make+Think+Code program, who let us use their spectacular main building, a renovated 100-year-old Federal Post Office. From Friday to Sunday, the event featured:

• 35 talks on topics ranging from DIY artificial intelligence to how to move a 2 ½ ton electron microscope.
• 16 workshops where participants got hands-on experience doing things like creating a self-portrait on a PCB and learning how to send secret messages with blinking lights.
• Delicious, locally produced food and drink from Portland area providers.
• After-hours fun with food, music, and Legos.

In between events, attendees were entertained by the form, light, sound, and, in one case, mustaches from seven different interactive installations, including a sculpture that illuminated using your own heartbeat and a couple of rogue “payphones” that actually received calls throughout the event. Naturally, we also had robot sumo wrestling.
After hours, we enjoyed eating, drinking, scheming, and laughing while taking in the view at Autodesk’s amazing new office building and their rooftop deck, sharing Chinese food at Crowd Supply’s new headquarters and our rooftop deck, searching for (and finding!) a new hackerspace deep under Portland’s bridges, and feeding quarters into our favorite vintage arcade games, among other things.
Of course, the very best parts of Teardown were simply the result of having a great group of people together at the same time and place. Whether over lunch or after a workshop, the air was always thick with the exchange of knowledge and ideas. Seeing so many creative people come together to share ideas, designs, and projects openly with each other was a beautiful thing to behold. The future of open source hardware looks bright – it’s a great time to be a hacker, maker, and creator.
Going into it, we didn’t really know what to expect from Teardown. Coming out of it, we’re sure of one thing: we’re definitely going to do this again. If you attended Teardown, thanks for sharing your time and talents to make it such a great event. Within the next few days, you will receive a survey to gather your feedback. If you weren’t able to attend, or missed a particular talk you wanted to see, keep an eye on Teardown updates as we post video recordings of many of the sessions.
We can’t wait for next year (though we might need a day or three to recover from this year). The future looks bright for Teardown

The Open Hardware Summit is at MIT on September 27th.  We always look forward to the presentations and love to hear about the projects that people are working on.  Please consider submitting a talk:

Submissions are due by 30 May 2018 at 11:59pm PST.

Notification of accepted proposals will happen by email in June.

Please submit ALL submissions via this form.

All submissions will be reviewed by several reviewers from the community and OSHWA board. Submissions are double blind with the exception of invited keynotes. 
All presentations will take place September 27 2018 between 9am and 5pm at MIT in Cambridge, MA, USA
Expected duration for talks is between 10 and 20 minutes, depending on the number and quality of submissions. All talks to be plenary (i.e. presented to the entire summit audience).
Talk submissions primarily containing marketing for a product, non-profit, or company, will not be accepted. However, talks that share knowledge and insight derived from work on commercial products or organizations are welcome.

Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic (HDDG) is tonight at SupplyFrame in San Francisco featuring talks by Roy Jui Liang Hung, Tanya Fish (Pimoroni) and Jason Kridner (BeagleBoard.org Foundation):This HDDG should be an awesome crowd as makers from all over are in the SF Bay Area this weekend for Maker Faire.

HDDG 30: Pre-Maker Faire Roundup!

Thursday, May 17, 2018, 6:30 PM

Supplyframe / Hackaday San Francisco Office 500 3rd Street, Suite 230 San Francisco, CA

Check out this Meetup →

(look for Drew Fustini in purple)

Can’t make it?  SupplyFrame will have LIVE STREAM starting at approximately 7:00pm US PDT:

Enjoy delicious food (that is unlikely to be pizza) and beverages while listening to fascinating technical talks by these crazy and creative engineers.
Tanya Fish – Explaining Electronics to the Unitiated Roy Jui Liang Hung – Mastering Animal Mechanics with the 3D Printer Jason Kridner – Simplifying Hardware Design with System-in-Package Tech

#bringahack Bay Area is this Sunday evening, May 20th!  Please join us for this wonderful tradition that Jeri Ellsworth started:

Sunday evening, May 20th, at BJ’s in San Mateo, 6pm to 12am

2206 Bridgepoint Parkway San Mateo, CA 94404 650-931-2990

 Check out last year for some inspiration:

Photos of Bring-A-Hack after Maker Faire Bay Area 2017

Didn’t get enough hardware hacking fun at Teardown this past weekend, tonight is Dorkbot PDX at Ctrl-H PDX hackerspace!

DorkbotPDX

people doing strange things with electricity

The address for Ctrl-H is:

7608 N Interstate  Portland, OR 97217 

Check out the Meetup event page for more information and look for our Drew Fustini 

in purple!

Part hackathon, part geek social, these biweekly meetings are a time for you to come join others for insight, inspiration or just insanity.
Bring your toys for others to see, or come see what others have been painstakingly chipping away at in their spare time.
Whether it’s code or chips, hacking of all sorts is encouraged. But we also like to hear your crazy ideas, so please come join us and bring your willingness to share your brilliance.
We’ll be the kids with all the coolest stuff on the table. Hope to see you there.
p.s. This event is open to everyone, dork or robot. No ^H membership is required to attend.

Teardown hardware hacking con starts today in Portland!  Follow @oshpark on Twitter for updates and look for our Drew Fustini in purple.  Check out the sessions page to see all the exciting people that will be presenting and running workshops!

Recent Updates

Bring Your Electronic Waste to Teardown!

Hebocon Robot Sumo Call for Participation

Nadya Peek, OSH Park, Early Bird Passes, and CFP Extension

Andrew “bunnie” Huang to keynote Teardown

We are proud to be a sponsor of Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire 2018 this Saturday, May 5th, at Carl Schurz High School:

Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire

the first and largest officially licensed Maker Faire in the Chicagoland area. We are a local, grassroots celebration of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) spirit in Chicago, focusing on education across all ages and social groups. Our makers represent a mix of beginners and experts, hobbyists and professionals, groups and individuals, and all ages, backgrounds, and interests. With a shoestring budget and only a dream, our inaugural Mini Maker Faire in April, 2012 was a smashing success thanks to the 50+ makers who shared their talents in 3D printing, robotics, jewelry making, and urban farming, just to name a few. Now with close to 100 makers, we’re still growing. Come experience it for yourself!

Tickets are free to the public.

The application deadline is Monday, April 30th, for the Ada Lovelace Fellowship to attend the 2018 Open Hardware Summit:

Ada Lovelace Fellowship

The Ada Lovelace Fellowship was founded in 2013 prior to the annual Open Hardware Summit at MIT by Summit Chair Addie Wagenknecht and OSHWA Director Alicia Gibb as a way to encourage women,  LGBTA+ and/or other minorities in open technology and culture to actively participate and foster a more diverse community within open source.
For the sixth year, we are excited to offer up to ten Open Hardware Fellowships to members of the community which includes a $500 travel stipend and entrance to the Open Hardware Summit.
By offering the annual travel and summit conference assistance to community members,  the Open Source Hardware Association hopes we as a community can encourage more women, LGBTA+ and/or people of color to participate in open source. We have many strong leaders and speakers in our field and we personally want to continue the trend upward

Learn how to design boards in KiCad this Saturday, April 28th, with Michael Welling:

One day KiCad Crash Course

We’ve asked Michael Welling of Qwerty Embedded Design to come to Reno to drop some knowledge on KiCad, an open source and multi-platform schematic capture and PCB layout tool. Michael uses KiCad for some of his famous designs such as LoFive, PocketBone, and BaconBits. Space is limited and you should have some basic electronics and CAD skills under your belt already to make the most of this unique opportunity.

This event will be recorded and live-streamed to the GroupGets YouTube channel

Time:

9:30am – 12:30pm
Break
2:00pm – 5:00pm

What to Bring:

If you would like to follow along bring a Laptop with KiCad installed

Links:

Syllabus (https://bit.ly/2Fhjvgk)

KiCad EDA (http://kicad-pcb.org/) 

Michael Welling (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwelling/)

Qwerty Embedded Design (https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/qwerty-embedded-design) 

LoFive (https://github.com/mwelling/lofive) 

PocketBone (https://github.com/mwelling/pocketbone-kicad) 

BaconBits (https://www.hackster.io/mwelling/baconbits-f09ee9)

Interested in learning how to design boards in KiCad?  Check out this upcoming 1-day class with @Michael Welling  in Reno, Nevada (USA) or watch it online:

One day KiCad Crash Course

We’ve asked Michael Welling of Qwerty Embedded Design to come to Reno to drop some knowledge on KiCad, an open source and multi-platform schematic capture and PCB layout tool. Michael uses KiCad for some of his famous designs such as LoFive, PocketBone, and BaconBits. Space is limited and you should have some basic electronics and CAD skills under your belt already to make the most of this unique opportunity.
This event will be recorded and live-streamed to the GroupGets YouTube channel. 

From Christopher Wang on the Hackaday blog:

Ada Lovelace Fellowships For 2018 Open Hardware Summit

The Open Source Hardware Association is now accepting applications for the Ada Lovelace fellowship which provides free admission to the Open Hardware Summit and a $500 travel stipend. One of OSHWA’s goals is to foster a more diverse community within open source. As part of this, Ada Lovelace Fellowships are open to women, LGBTA+, and people of color. There are a total of 10 fellowships available and applications are due by April 30th. The Open Hardware Summit will be held on September 27th at MIT.

The fellowship program, founded by Addie Wagenknecht and Alicia Gibb in 2013, builds on the ideal that Open Hardware is one way to reduce the barriers associated in access to technology. Removing some of the financial barriers associated with attending the Summit will help to ensure more people of diverse backgrounds are involved in shaping the Open Hardware world. In addition to the talks shared at the gathering, over the last several year OSWHA has been evolving the Open Hardware definition and an Open Hardware certification.

CrowdSupply is organizing a new hardware con named Teardown in Portland on the weekend of May 11th – 13th:

Teardown 2018

A party for hacking, discovering, and sharing hardware
Teardown is an event put on by Crowd Supply in association with Make+Think+Code @ PNCA. You can think of Teardown as live-action Crowd Supply, but with fewer cardboard boxes and packing peanuts. We’ll be bringing together hardware aficionados from around the world to celebrate, inspect, create, and, of course, tear down hardware.
There will be long-time Crowd Supply creators and backers, as well as people we’re meeting for the first time. There will be hardware, art, food, drink, puzzles, workshops, tutorials, talks, music, field trips, and friends. Most of all, there will be ideas and projects to explore and inspire. We hope you’ll be there too!

Latest update: Andrew “bunnie” Huang to keynote Teardown

Please considering submitting a proposal like a talk, workshop, demo or installation:

Teardown 2018: Call for proposals

Tomorrow, Saturday March 31st, at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago:

MSI Chicago Mini Maker Faire

On Saturday, March 31 we're keeping our doors open from 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. as we host the MSI Chicago Mini Maker Faire! Join some of the most fascinating, curious people—from engineers and artists, to scientists and crafters—in a celebration of local maker culture. Learn how to become an innovator yourself by speaking one-on-one with makers, and leave inspired and ready to invent.

Look for our Drew Fustini in purple!

Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago is TONIGHT (Wednesday, March 28th)! Come hang out with Drew Fustini, @Chris Gammell, @Andrew Sowa and many more at Haymarket (737 W Randolph St)

The world’s biggest open source hardware 3-D printer festival is this weekend in Goshen, Indiana (USA):

2018 Midwest RepRap Festival (MRRF)

Friday, March 23, 2018 at 3:00 PM – Sunday, March 25, 2018 at 6:00 PM (EDT)

What is MRRF?   It’s the worlds largest celebration of open source 3D printing with over 1,000 people from around the globe attending in 2017.   If you are a hobbyists, enthusiast or any level of user of 3D printing then come on out and enjoy the weekend with others.  Not sure what 3D printing is or want to learn more about it?  Perfect!  Come out and see what it’s all about.

Hackaday has a great recap of MRRF last year:

The Midwest RepRap Festival Spectacular

Check out the MRRF newsletter for the latest details and follow MRRF on Twitter.  And look for our Drew Fustini this weekend who will, of coruse, be wearing purple and carrying lots of OSH Park coupons to share!

Hackaday World Create Day is this Saturday, March 17th, in many cities around the world including Portland at Ctrl-H PDX Hackerspace:

Embedded Apprentice Linux Engineer (E-ALE) is a series of 9 seminars over 3 days at existing Embedded Linux conferences:

Are you an Embedded Engineer who is transitioning to using Linux? Attend seminars on how to start with using Linux for Embedded Applications. The Embedded Apprentice Linux Engineer program provides a place at existing Embedded conferences where you can get your questions answered.

Embedded Apprentice Linux Engineer Hands on Workshops at SCALE 16x in Pasadena from Thursday, March 8th to Saturday, March 10th:

Embedded Apprentice Linux Engineer track at The Linux Foundation’s Embedded Linux Conference in Portland from Monday, March 12 to Wednesday, March 14:

Here's a list of some project with great PCB artwork:

Pure art boards:

Full Panel PCB Painting

https://hackaday.io/page/3353-full-panel-pcb-painting-fabricated

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/06/26/pcb-artwork-in-2017/

Hand-drawn PCB Artwork

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/04/06/pcb-paintings/

Making Braille Signs out of PCBs

https://blog.oshpark.com/2017/11/02/making-braille-signs-out-of-pcbs/

PCB lapel pin

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/07/05/building-a-pcb-lapel/

Full panel PCB sign by Andrew Sowa

https://www.instagram.com/p/BcGrEupBJQi/

Lumen Electronic Jewelry

http://blog.oshpark.com/2016/10/31/lumen-electronic-jewelry/

Creating the Benchoff Nickel

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/03/30/creating-the-benchoff-nickel/

PCB Paintings Facebook group

https://www.facebook.com/pcbpaintings/

PCB Painting Art Nouveau

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/02/12/pcb-painting-art-nouveau/

Convert Inkscape SVG drawings to KiCad footprints

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/01/08/convert-inkscape-svg-drawings-to-kicad-footprints/

Functional boards with awesome art/layouts:

OSHWi Octopus Badge by Gustavo Reynaga

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/12/24/oshwi-octopus-badge-by-gustavo-reynaga/

Trammell Hudson PCB art soldering badge

https://trmm.net/PCB_art

https://twitter.com/oshpark/status/885169000619159553/photo/1

Minifigure Atmel SAMD21 Board

http://blog.oshpark.com/2016/11/09/minifigure-atmel-samd21-board/

https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/QveMnbke

Cyborg Ring by @zakqwy  of neurotinker

http://blog.oshpark.com/2018/02/09/cyborg-ring/

Glowbugs by @JasMoH and reverse mount LEDs

https://hackaday.io/project/28155-silly-pcb-designs/log/71997-glowbugs

OSH Park PCB Crown

https://tekdemo.github.io/pcb-crown/

https://tekdemo.github.io/pcb-crown/images/2014-05-18%2019.55.57.jpg

http://blog.oshpark.com/2016/07/23/lessons-in-3d-circuits/

PCB Art With 4 Layer Boards

https://tekdemo.github.io/2014/09/18/PCB-art-with-4-layer-boards.html

https://tekdemo.github.io/images/no-know-coin//2014-07-01%2022.05.31.jpg

Brain board for Sarah Petkus' Noodle robot

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CRjjlwWUAAEAKpD.jpg:large http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/04/30/robotic-arts-noodle-is-gettin-bean-feet/

https://roboticarts.wordpress.com/2015/10/24/the-walking-noodle/

Heart-shaped Flashlight PCB

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/03/28/heart-shaped-flashlight-pcb/

Snowbot

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/02/21/snowbot/

Trixel Interactive LED Kit

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/04/04/trixel-interactive-led-kit/

4CHord MIDI

http://blog.oshpark.com/2017/07/27/4chord-midi/

https://twitter.com/oshpark/status/913954089461063680?s=19

Software Defined Radio (SDR) project by Eric Brombaugh:

iceRadio

This is a test prototype for experimenting with Software Defined Radio (SDR). It is composed of several boards that are described in detail elsewhere on this site:

• VHF Tuner – 20MHz – 1200MHz VHF/UHF downconverter.
• RXADC Board – 40MSPS 14-bit ADC for capturing HF-band RF signals.
• STM32F303 and ice5 Board – MCU and FPGA which implement the digital receiver.
• I2S DAC PMOD – Used for stereo audio output of demodulated signals.

Combined with suitable firmware and FPGA design, these boards comprise a receiver capable of capturing 20kHz of signal from DC to over 1GHz, demodulating it with a variety of formats and driving high-quality audio.

Tuner

RF input from the antenna can optionally be tuned down from VHF/UHF frequncies to an IF frequency in the HF range before passing to the ADC.

ADC

Raw HF or downconverted VHF at an IF of 5MHz is digitized to 14-bit resolution. The maximum input signal allowed without exceeing the range of the ADC puts the 0dBfs point of this system at -10dBm in 50 ohms. The ADC runs at 40MSPS with a resolution of 10 bits, providing approximately 60dB of dynamic range and 20MHz of bandwidth which places the quantization noise floor at about -70dBm.

FPGA

From the ADC, data passes into the FPGA. This is an iCE5LP4k part which provides 20 4kb RAM blocks and 4 16×16 MAC blocks which are essential for the DSP required for the downconversion. In the FPGA the ADC data is pre-processed to a sample rate appropriate for the MCU. Figure 2 below shows the primary components of the FPGA design.

The C and Verilog source code is available on GitHub:

emeb/iceRadio

Need 100 square inches or more?

Our 2 Layer Medium Run service is $1 per square inch and ships in 15 calendar days or fewer:

2 Layer Medium Run Service

$1 per square inch, 100 square inch minimum. You can have as many different designs as you want, as long as each design is ordered in a multiple of 10 boards.

For example, if you had two different 5 square inch designs, you could order 10 of each for a total cost of $100.

100 inches is just the minimum order. You can order as much as you’d like beyond that.

Turn Times

Fabrication time can vary for medium run orders, but boards will ship in 15 calendar days or fewer.

Medium Run orders cannot be expedited. For faster fabrications options, you may be interested in our 2 Layer Service or even faster 2 Layer Super Swift Service.

You can get a quote, approve a design, and pay for an order at OSH Park.

2 Layer PCB Specs

Quick Specs

• 6 mil (0.1524mm) minimum trace width
• 6 mil (0.1524mm) minimum trace spacing
• 10 mil (0.2540mm) minimum drill
• 5 mil (0.127mm) annular ring
• PCB thickness of 1.6mm (.063”)
• 1oz copper on both sides (1.4mil, 35um)

Detailed Specs

• ENIG (gold) finish for superior soldering and environmental resistance.
• Solder resist and silkscreen on both sides.
• Minimum 15 mil (0.3810mm) keepout distance from traces to the board edge.
• PCB substrate is FR4 (170 Tg).
• PCB substrate is compatible with a lead-free process.
• The boards themselves are also lead free and RoHS compliant.
• PCB Substrate dielectric constant of 4.6 at 1MHz.
• Minimum 4 mil soldermask web.
• Maximum soldermask expansion, retraction, or shift is 3mil.
• Minimum 100 mil (2.54mm) width on internal cutouts. See our Slots page for further information.
• Manufactured in the United States.
• Castellations are allowed, but not officially supported.
• Non-plated slots smaller than 100 mil (2.54mm) are not officially supported.
• Plated slots and smaller slots are possible, but not officially supported. See our Slots page for more.

From Mark Smith on the Surf ‘n Circuits blog:

Optimizing the 5v to 170v Nixie Tube Power Supply Design

A few years ago, while managing the power management product line at work, I started an initiative with the development team to optimize new products by achieving ESE.  ESE stands for Equations = Simulations = Experimentation.   The idea is centered on the engineering goal of product design to verify that the systems design equations match the simulation results and ultimately the experimental results.
When these three items match, not only do you understand a system, but you have the best chance to optimize a better solution.  I’ll have to say that in today’s mad dash to get new products out the door, achieving ESE is not always possible.    But to break through the ordinary and have a chance for the extraordinary, I would say this is a requirement.    Since this power supply is just a fun design for an upcoming nixie tube clock project of mine, I have the time to achieve ESE.

The updated schematic, BOM, Kicad Layout, and design files are located at Github:

surfncircuits has shared the board on OSH Park:

NixieSupply5vto160vDCMBoost_Rev2_1804

Here is a quick video showing six IN-4 Nixie tubes being powered by a 5v iPhone charger:

https://videopress.com/v/9tb9rW3s

Miasma is a pure analog oscillator module based on the Curtis CEM3340 chips used in legendary ’80s synths, with new & innovative signal patching:

Miasma: Classic Dual Voice Eurorack Synthesizer Module

We designed the Miasma Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) to bring that classic ’80s synthesizer sound back to Eurorack modular systems. We just couldn’t find any currently available oscillators with the sound textures and capabilities that we wanted, so we had to design our own; and now you get to own one as well. 

There are many unique capabilities built into Miasma that you won’t find in any other oscillator module, like the built-in patching and cross modulation structures that make Miasma so flexible in your rack. However, it’s all about the sound – so let’s start with some Miasma audio samples, before we go into the technical details of how we make that sound possible (best listening with Headphones!)

Valerio Backslashnew has designed a small dock for the Onion Omega 2 and 2+:

My Omega 2/2+ dock\new

I needed the smallest dock i could do, that featured:

• Ethernet
• Type A USB host
• Micro USB for power

Here’s what i came up with, i called it dock\new.

It has an onboard linear voltage regulation (i didn’t bother going with a switching one for such low power), magnetics integrated in the RJ45 connector to save space, USB host ESD protection (diode array), USB host PTC fuse.
On the left side there is the RJ45 connector and nothing on the back side of the board, so that you can easily access the MicroSD card on the Omega 2+.
On the right side (the antenna side of the omega) you have the USB type A connector, facing outwards, and the microusb connector for power, facing inwards.

The project is open source (CC-BY-SA 4.0), and the KiCad schematics, board layout and the other files are available on GitHub:

5N44P/omega-dock-new

5N44P has shared the board on OSH Park:

omega-dock-new.kicad_pcb

Brian Benchoff writes in the latest Hackaday Links about @peter jansen:

A while ago,  jansen [Peter Jansen], the guy who built a tricorder and a laser-cut CT scanner, made a magnetic camera. This Hall Effect camera is a camera for magnetism instead of light. Now, this camera has been fully built and vastly improved. He’s capturing ‘frames’ of magnetism in a spinning fan at 2000 Hz (or FPS, terminology kind of breaks down here), and it’s beautiful.

We are thrilled with this adventurous project by @zakqwy:

Cyborg Ring

cordwood + smt + jewelry + blinkies + zinc-air batteries

This project evolved from Splinter, the SMT cordwood project I did last summer/fall. The ring is powered by tiny size 10 hearing aide batteries which should give 4-6 weeks of intermittent use, once I come up with a design that doesn’t break after a few days of wear and update the firmware to put the ATtinyx5 to sleep. The first rev (labelled ‘blink-ring’) used deep red 650nm LEDs. Searching for particular component lengths gave me an excuse to use strange 0508 resistors. And somehow, this is my first Charlieplexing project. Yaay novelty soldering!

@ɖҿϝիɟթվ created this project to play arcade games on the Micro:bit:

Micro:Boy

The Micro:bit is a pretty decent platform for teaching kids to program, but you can’t really make arcade-style games for it. You only have two buttons and a 5×5 display. Perhaps enough for a very small snake game, but that’s pretty much it. That’s why I started working on #PewPew FeatherWing as an alternative platform, but at some point I started wondering if it’s really impossible to do it on the micro:bit.

When the most recent version of micropython got the ability to use any pins for I2C, I realized that I can finally connect a display easily. I could use a HT16K33 and a 8×8 LED matrix like on the PewPew, but I decided to try something else — a monochrome OLED display, similar to the one used on many Arduino-based game consoles

Happy Lunar New Year!

We would like to let our customers know that all OSH Park boards are manufactured in the United States, and we will be operating on a normal schedule during Lunar New Year:

Shipping Information and Turnaround Times

There are two periods of time to think about when making your order:

• Fabrication time between when you place your order and when we receive boards from the fab.
• Shipping time between when we ship and when the post office delivers your order to you.

All PCBs ship from Lake Oswego, Oregon, and are fully manufactured in the United States.

Do you like Science, Technology, Art, and Hacking?  SparkleCon is this weekend at 23b hackerspace in the Los Angeles area:

SparkleCon

SparkleCon is a two day event where people from all walks of life come to share and participate in art, science, computers, security, and hacking. It has been hosted at 23b Hackerspace since 2013 and as attendance has grown over the years so has the extremeness of the events contents. Come and enjoy things like 3D body scanning, lock picking, coding, 3D printing, large Tesla coils, and nuclear fusion.

The Mountain View Reverse Engineering Meetup will be meeting at Giovanni’s New York Pizzeria in Sunnyvale, CA this Wednesday, January 10th:

We have the side room (ie including TV) reserved for talks.
7:00-7:10: mingle
7:10-7:50: “Reverse Engineering Midway Zeus” by Philip B
7:50:-8:00: mingle
8:00-8:20: “Using open source tools to reverse engineer and modify UEFI bioses” by Matt M
8:20-9:00: mingle

Look for Drew Fustini in purple!  He learned of this meetup from the Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast hosted by Jen Costillo and @Alvaro Prieto.  Check out the latest episode:

Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast #7: Candy Coated

Share this:

@Jens Hauke designed this charlieplexed 20 LED blinker controlled by an ATTiny45 for the Hackaday Coin Cell Challenge:

LED Ring

This is a small blinky with 20 LEDs powered by one CR2032 coin cell and with an ATTiny45 brain. The firmware is written in plain C and compiled with the avr-gcc toolchain. The PCB is a two layer design made with KiCad.

Space efficient daisychained LED placing with shared anode/cathode soldering pads.

Firmware and gerbers are available on GitHub:

jensh/attiny-20led-ring

Here is a video of the LED in action:

The next Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic is on Thursday, January 11th, at SupplyFrame’s San Francisco office:

• Mo McBirney: The Iron Giants: Automation in Manufacturing
• Kenneth Finnegan: Amateur Radio and Their Internet of Things

Hackster.io is organizing a Google Android Things Meetup in San Francisco on Thursday, January 18th:

Android Things Meetup (with Google)

Thursday, Jan 18, 2018, 6:00 PM

HAX, 479 Jessie Street San Francisco, CA

Google and Hackster have teamed up to host a night dedicated to Google’s Android Things in downtown San Francisco.

Be sure to register on the Eventbrite page:

Google Android Things Meetup

Have you ever wanted to design and develop your own products? Android Things lets you build professional, mass-market products on a trusted platform without previous knowledge of embedded system design. With an easy-to-use software development platform based on Android Studio and access to the Android SDK you’ll be on your way to developing the next big IoT product.

Wayne Piekarski of Google will be speaking at the meetup and gave this presentation earlier this year at Google I/O:

From Prototype to Production Devices with Android Things (Google I/O '17)

@Benchoff  writes about @spetku and her Noodle Feet robot:

Sarah Petkus On Building A Cartoon To Go To Mars

Sarah Petkus is a robot mom (which means she’s the mother to a robot, not that Sarah herself is a robot, at least as far as we’re aware), whose child, Noodle Feet, is a character in Sarah’s graphic novel Gravity Road. Unlike every other robot on the planet, Noodle Feet is a content-based robot. Instead of robotic arms welding car panels together or 3D printers squiring out goo, Noodle Feet isn’t a robot built for a specific function. Noodle Feet’s design is derived from his personality in his graphic novel. In the graphic novel, Noodle Feet tastes with his feet, clambers over rocks, and explores his surroundings. That’s what the real-life version of Noodle Feet must do, and that means building the hardware to do just that.

Sarah has been working on Noodle Feet for about two years now, and last year she presented a talk about tasting feet and salivating toes. It’s odd, yes, but it is a fantastic exploration of what can be done with robotics.

This year, Sarah had the opportunity to be an artist in residence at ESA, where Noodle Feet could at least test out his dream of living on Mars. There, Noodle Feet played around in the ESA’s Mars yard, where he made friends with a copy of the ExoMars rover.

Since we last checked out the design of Noodle Feet, Sarah has put a lot of work into what her progeny actually does. Last year, Noodle Feet came out with fancy, grippy, retractable toes designed to clamber over rocks and extraterrestrial environments. In the year since Noodle Feet has gotten a few upgrades.

The first such upgrade is a giving module. Noodle Feet, for reasons unexplained in Sarah’s talk, like to hand out beans. The giving module is a cybernetic addition to Noodle Feet’s exoskeleton meant to dispense small trinkets in his wake. This module is designed somewhat like an Archimedes screw that scoops beans up and poops them out as Noodle Feet travels along the terrain.

Another Noodle module that has seen an upgrade from last year is the salivation module. Yes, Noodle Feet salivates and leaves a wake of sticky goo behind him. Salivating implies tasting, and this year Sarah has figured out a way to give Noodle another sense. Sarah took a spool of litmus paper and calibrated a color sensor to detect acidity. It’s a reasonable stand-in for a sense of sourness, but it is a sense of sourness.

Noodle is still growing, and Sarah is exploring what it means for a robot to go through puberty. There’s still a lot of parts to build for Noodle, and you can check out the entire build log over on Sarah’s development blog

A holiday project by Dan Hienzsch (@rheingoldheavy) to build a little Snowbot with an adjustable speed larson scanner for an eye:

Snowbot V1.0

The Snowbot has three major subsystems: Power and Timer and Display.
Power Subsystem
The power subsystem uses a 3.7V LiPO battery boosted to 5V with an SC4503 boost converter to power the fully analog circuit. It requires a set of passive components in order to generate the higher voltage.

Timer Subsystem
The timer subsystem is comprised of a 555 IC that generates a clock signal. The speed of the clock is adjusted by twisting the potentiometer (the nose of the snowbot). The clock signal ticks through the outputs of a CD4017 decade counter, lighting each LED in sequence, then moving back through them again.

Display Subsystem
The display subsystem involves taking the output of the CD4017, and directing it to six red LEDs in the form of a larson scanner. In addition to lighting the LED, the current also charges a 22uF capacitor through a diode. When the output moves to the next LED, the cap discharges through a 2.2K resistor (part of a resistor network), fading the LED out gracefully.

Alex Glow of Hackster.io takes a look at the OSHWi octopus badge designed by Gustavo Reynaga:

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

hulkco/oshwi_2017

GReynaga has shared the board on OSH Park:

001_Hackster_Rev1.kicad_pcb

Oshwi Badge HACKSTER Version Rev 1

From Brian Benchoff on the Hackaday blog:

Next Week’s Bay Area Meetups

Next week we’ll be at a few awesome hardware meetups around the Bay Area, and we want you to head out and join us.

Silicon Valley Hardware Meetup – Reboot!

Wednesday, Dec 6, 2017, 6:30 PM

Evil Mad Scientist 1285 Forgewood Avenue Sunnyvale, CA

HDDG 25 – Electronics in Chunks

Thursday, Dec 7, 2017, 6:30 PM

Supplyframe SF Office 500 3rd St STE230 San Francisco, CA

Look for Drew Fustini in purple at both of these events!

@Timothy Woo  has launched a Indiegogo campaign to manufacture his open-source, Arduino-compatible, wireless PCB reflow oven controller:

Reflowduino: Circuit Board Assembly for Everyone!

Reflowduino is the first completely open-source, Arduino-compatible reflow oven controller of its kind that enables practically anyone to assemble their own beautiful circuit boards at home!
Reflowduino comes loaded with features, all in a compact Arduino-compatible package, with full documentation, example code, demo app, and comprehensive wiki on Github.

Reflowduino is designed to be extremely easy to use! The general concept is to switch the power of the appliance on or off with a solid-state relay as shown below, measuring the temperature by placing the thermocouple tip inside the oven during the whole process.

If nothing else, please share this campaign to your friends, family, and anyone who might be interested on social media! Remember that every view counts for me, and I’m depending on you to make this happen!

LTE NB-IoT Shield for Arduino by @Timothy Woo 

This open-source LTE shield uses SIMCOM’s SIM7000-series modules with the latest LTE CAT-M technology to allow Arduino users to painlessly connect their low-power IoT devices with the next-generation cellular technology!

NB-IoT is also available for many countries (but sadly not in the USA yet) simply by swapping out to a different SIM7000 module version. Luckily SIMCOM made it super easy to integrate this module because most of the AT commands are identical to previous version, and Adafruit has a wonderful library for their FONA 2G and 3G products. Check it out and help make this happen!

You can view the latest code and design files here on my Github page: https://github.com/botletics/NB-IoT-Shield. Note: The hardware works great but software is still under development! I plan on launching an Indiegogo campaign when I get a fully-working prototype, so stay tuned for updates!

Retro gaming project by @Frank Buss 

Vectrex cartridge

This is my first version of a PCB for building a Vectrex cartridge. I used this for my Kickstarter project for the Bloxorz game. The PCB was manufactured by @oshpark , you can order your board here.

It fits in this 3D printed case from Thingiverse (you can order it here in my Shapeways shop), or in one of the nice new injection molded cartridge shells from Sean Kelly

Frank has launched a Kickstarter campaign:

Bloxorz for Vectrex, PC, Mac, iOS and Android

A puzzle game for the Vectrex, including a version with Vectrex graphics for PC, Mac, iOS and Android

FrankBuss has shared the board on OSH Park:

vectrex.brd

From Brian Benchoff on the Hackaday blog:

Real-Life Electronic Neurons

NeruroBytes is not a strange platform for neural nets. It’s physical neurons, rendered in PCBs and Molex connectors. Now, finally, it’s a Kickstarter project, and one of the more exciting educational electronic projects we’ve ever seen.

Regular Hackaday readers should be very familiar with NeuroBytes. It began as a project for the Hackaday Prize all the way back in 2015. There, it was recognized as a finalist for the Best Product,

Since then, the team behind NeuroBytes have received an NHS grant, they’re certified Open Source Hardware through OSHWA, and there are now enough NeuroBytes to recreate the connectome of a flatworm. It’s doubtful the team actually has enough patience to recreate the brain of even the simplest organism, but is already an impressive feat.

The highlights of the NeuroBytes Kickstarter include seven different types of neurons for different sensory systems, kits to test the patellar reflex, and what is probably most interesting to the Hackaday crowd, a Braitenberg Vehicle chassis, meant to test the ideas set forth in Valentino Braitenberg’s book, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. If that book doesn’t sound familiar, BEAM robots probably do; that’s where the idea for BEAM robots came from.

Tiny ESP32 board from the Kilobyte store on Tindie with optional battery header and pSRAM:

Tiny ESP32 WROVER pSRAM board

It’s a little ESP32 Board. Perfect for controlling or sensing stuff in the real world and sync it to the internet! Despite that it features the ESP32 WROVER Module. This means it got 4MB FLASH and 4MB RAM. That’s an absolute incredible amount of RAM. I honestly have no clue for what I will ever need 4MB in my embedded Projects.

Why did you make it?
I wanted a small ESP32 Board with the pSRAM and which works and doesn’t eat your whole time to get it working and find it’s issues and quirks.
I’ve used the CP2102 Serial converter because this is the one, which works the best way to program the ESP32. Even Espressif uses this serial converter on their own dev boards.

What makes it special?
It’s propably the smallest ESP32 Board with pSRAM. Despite the size it’s ideal for battery operation. It uses under 200uA in Deep Sleep mode!

Kelly, Dan, Chris and Drew are excited to be traveling to Pasadena this weekend for Hackaday Supercon.  Look for us in purple!

If you aren’t able to attend and still want to be able to hack on the badge, then you can order one from Tindie:

2017 Hackaday Superconference Badge

Follow Hackaday on YouTube or on Facebook as two days of live streaming talks begin this Saturday morning.

Dan Maloney writes on Hackaday about Timothy Woo’s Reflowduino:

Hackaday Prize Entry: Reflowduino, the Open Source Reflow Oven Controller

Face it — you want a reflow oven. Even the steadiest hands and best eyes only yield “meh” results with a manual iron on SMD boards, and forget about being able to scale up to production. But what controller should you use when you build your oven, and what features should it support? Don’t worry…

Dubbed the Reflowduino for obvious reasons, Timothy Woo’s Hackaday Prize entry has everything you need in a reflow oven controller, and a few things you never knew you needed.

Kumar Abhishek has announced on his blog a project that he has been working on the past four months:

Announcing: BeagleLogic Standalone

BeagleLogic Standalone is a specialized version of the BeagleBone which is intended to be used a logic analyzer based on BeagleLogic.

This logic analyzer has networking capabilities (10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet); it can be used to used to debug circuits remotely. And as it is a full-featured Linux computer, you can run the sigrok set of tools directly on the BeagleLogic Standalone board (they come preinstalled in the BeagleLogic system image), or on your host PC. It has 16 channels and can sample up to 1.5 seconds of data at the maximum sample rate, which is 100MSamples/sec (3 seconds of data if using only the first 8 channels).

I designed and 3D printed a snug fit “open” case for the BeagleLogic standalone board. I’ve written more about it in a Hackaday.io project log.

BeagleLogic Standalone is one of the 20 finalists in the Best Product round of the Hackaday Prize. The results are awaited on the 11th of November. It’s been a great journey taking BeagleLogic standalone from a concept to a prototype and giving a glimpse as to what it could be as a finished product and the experience I gained during the process is invaluable, and I wish to thank Hackaday for providing me with this opportunity.
If enough people sign up, I plan on organizing a group buy for BeagleLogic Standalone boards. If you want to get one, please do not hesitate and sign up here.
The documentation for the board is available at standalone.beaglelogic.net. You can also follow the project on Hackaday.io here

From John Baichtal over on the Hackaday blog:

Making Braille Signs out of PCBs

[jg] recently passed some damaged Braille signs and took on the challenge of repairing them. Informed by his recent work on PCB lapel pins, [jg] immediately thought of using circuit boards for this project. He’d noticed that round solder pads made for uniform hills of solder, and this reminded him of the bumps in Braille.

He began by reading up on the standards of the Braille Authority of North America, which stipulates a dot height of 0.6mm. He loaded up the PharmaBraille font system and laid it out the dots in photoshop, then and imported it into KiCad and laid out the boards. When the PCBs had arrived from OSH Park, [jg] soldering up the pads (lead free, but of course) to see if he could get the hills to 0.6mm. He’s experimenting with different methods of melting the solder to try to get more even result

Radomir Dopieralski has created handheld game console programmable with (Micro/Circuit)Python:

µGame

A small game console directly programmable in Python. I always wanted to make this, and after my work on #PewPew FeatherWing I finally decided that I’m ready.

The first version may be a bit of a stretch — I tried to make it as small as possible, fitting in the 5x5cm limit of PCB manufacturers, so that it will be cheap to make the PCBs. Using the cheap ST7735 TFT display, and a cheap ATSAMD21E chip. I also tried to put all the components on one side of the board, but failed with that — the power and reset switch had to go on the back, as well as the buzzer

Chip McClelland designed this Particle Electron carrier board to enhance the reliability and capabilities his outdoor IoT project:

Particle Electron Carrier for Outdoor IoT Applications

I have been building IoT sensors for outdoor use for a few years now. Most of my focus has been on helping local parks better count and report the cars, bikers, joggers and hikers which use their facilities each day. By giving them an accurate and automatic way to measure park utilization, They can save significant labor costs, get a more complete count and facilitate reporting. My hope is that this work will show how important our parks are and help preserve and even expand funding for these vital community resources.

Longer term, I also want to collect environmental and health data with these devices and I realized that a general purpose enhancement to the Particle Electron would be useful in all manner of applications that I – or the community – might dream up. This project, developed in collaboration with the Particle community (see Team link) is open source and available to anyone who can wants to deploy IoT devices where there is no WiFi or utility power.

These carriers have proved to be very reliable and have survived 6 months so far in the North Carolina Summer. I have started working on a Solar Implementation and have some ideas for future improvement. Please let me know if this is helpful and if you have any comments or suggestions that could help improve the carrier.

chipmc has shared the board on OSH Park:

Electron Carrier Board v2.2

From Jeremy S. Cook on the Tindie blog:

Rotary Encoder with I2C Interface and RGB Lighting

Makernet Knob’s makes the point that “Rotary encoders are cool but hard to wire into your projects.” Having wired up a custom input device for my computer using an encoder, I can attest to both of these statements. In my case, it took me quite a bit of time simply to figure out how each encoder pin was used!

To help alleviate complicated wiring issues, this custom knob features a built-in I2C interface, which allows several (even hundereds) of knobs to be chained together without issue. Additionally, the top of the encoder can be depressed as a pushbutton, and it even has an RGB LED integrated inside of it to give you feedback right on the knob

We are proud to be a sponsor of this Maker Faire Orlando soldering kit:

Advanced soldering training at Maker Faire Orlando

For the past six years at Maker Faire Orlando, members of FamiLab have taught attendees how to solder with a cool little Makey pin with 2 self-flashing LEDs.  We’ve been asked for more advanced soldering training, and we responded with the addition of a PIC-microcontroller-based board twinkling several LEDs, and with a switch that can be used to change the LED display pattern.

We opted to design the board such that it can be used as a pendant on a necklace (lanyard) or as a keychain (especially for those of you who like large keychains). The design is a scalloped 2.7″ circle with LEDs on the outside circle, and a hole at the top for a keyring. Batteries are on the back of the board.

Resources

• Assembly instructions: MFO-SK-Instruction-Sheet-v04
• Base assembly code: main.asm

This weekend, October 21st & 22nd, is Maker Faire Orlando!

Maker Faire Orlando is a non-profit, community-organized, family-friendly celebration featuring local do-it-yourself science, art, rockets, robots, crafts, technology, music, hands-on-activities, and more. It’s an event where people show what they are making and share what they are learning.
The individuals behind these exhibits are known as “Makers” and they range from tech enthusiasts to crafters to homesteaders to scientists to garage tinkerers. They are of all ages and backgrounds. The aim of Maker Faire is to entertain, inform, connect and grow this community.

We’ve been busy prepping the Central Florida Fairgrounds & Expo Halls for Maker Faire Orlando 2017! Now you can check out the official program or mobile apps (iOS, Android) for information about Maker Faire including featured exhibits, hands-on workshops, and schedules for Combat Robots and Power Racing.

Look for Drew in purple!

Assembly instructions on Mike Rankin’s blog:

SAMD21G Sensor Board with Color Oled

Design files and source are available on GitHub:

mike-rankin/SAMD21G18A_Sensor_Board_with_Color_Oled

This Sensor Board is yet another variation of another one on my site. It is not for sale with no real purpose in mind but the design files to make your own are here. The project was created as design challenge. My full time job is pcb design work and as a hobby I enjoy experimenting with new design ideas.

This was one of the more challenging designs I’ve worked on in a while. A few times I’d given up on routing it. Evan using four routing layers I found it tough. The idea was to hide the bezel of the display behind the board but have sensor components on that same board. It would look something like a little tiny television with all the components around the edges.

This latest revision has fixed a few issues I found on previous versions but the design idea can possibly help others in some way. Full credit goes to Adafruit for publishing the Feather M0 design files along with the bootloader. I used the Feather design to create the schematic for my board.

Maker Faire Denver and SparkFun AVC is this weekend! 

Look for Drew in purple!

Michael Weinberg of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) published this blog post for the 2017 Open Hardware Summit last week in Denver:

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Open Source Hardware Licensing

Open source hardware isn’t that easy. It is actually a mix of a bunch of different elements covered by a bunch of different types of IP.  That means that you are probably going to need to pick a few types of licenses for a few different parts of your hardware.
OSHWA is working on building a tool to make this easier to figure out, but in the meantime I wanted to throw up a quick post setting up a bit of a framework.  This framework is largely based on the work that Ryan Lawson and Adam Alperowicz did as students at the NYU Technology Law and Policy Clinic, although all errors are entirely mine.

The videos from ORConf 2017 are now online including this talk about hardware licensing:

The CERN OHL v2 and copyleft licences for HDL

Pamela Liou gave the 2017 Open Hardware Summit keynote last Thursday in Denver (skip to the 6 minute mark):

Pamela spoke about her desktop loom project:

Doti: The Desktop Jacquard Loom

We are proud to sponsor the 2017 Open Hardware Summit next Thursday, October 5th, in Denver at the McNichols Civic Center!

There is an exciting schedule of speakers! Big thanks to the OHS17 team for all their hard work.  Drew, Kelly and Laen are excited to be there (in purple of course).

Please note that this event follows the Summit on Thursday:

Women Who Hack Dinner and Drinks: open to woman id-ing members of the community, must RSVP by Sept 28th. Hosted by Sophi Kravitz of HackaDay and OHS Chair Addie Wagenknecht.

Can't wait for OHS17?  Check out these recordings from OHS16 in Portland:

• Open Hardware Summit 2016: morning sessions
• Open Hardware Summit 2016: afternoon sessions

Zach Fredin of NeuroTinker designed this derivative of the Black Magic Probe to replace the fingerprint reader on his ThinkPad X220 laptop:

TP-BMP

A PCB-layout-only remix of 1BitSquared/Black Sphere Technologies’ excellent Black Magic Probe v2.1. Designed to replace the fingerprint reader in the palm rest on some Thinkpads, because when have you _not_ needed an ARM debugger with a built-in UART port?
Runs stock firmware and grabs USB from the fingerprint reader’s FFC connector (well… +5VDC from the touchpad). Not tested on anything other than my X220 (but it seems to work!). Cable harnesses get stuffed in the o’l ExpressCard slot for storage.

LoFive RISC-V dev board designed by @Michael Welling  now on GroupGets:

LoFive is a small board based on the SiFive Freedom E310 open source SoC

Specifications

• MCU – SiFive Freedom E310 (FE310) 32-bit RV32IMAC processor @ up to 320+ MHz (1.61 DMIPS/MHz)
• Storage - 128-Mbit SPI flash (ISSI IS25LP128)
• Expansion - 2x 14-pin headers with JTAG, GPIO, PWM, SPI, UART, 5V, 3.3V and GND
• Misc - 1x reset button, 16 MHz crystal
• Power Supply - 5V via pin 1 on header; Operating Voltage: 3.3 V and 1.8 V
• Dimensions - 38 x 18 mm (estimated)
• License - CERN Open Hardware Licence v1.2

Resources

• Github

From Raphael Chang:

Battman Battery Management System

As part of the fully custom electric longboard I am building, I designed a battery management system (BMS) for a 12 cell lithium ion battery pack. The BMS, named “Battman”, is meant to monitor both Lithium Polymer cells (LiPo) and Lithium Iron Phosphate cells (LiFePo4), and it can protect the batteries against undervoltage, overvoltage, overcurrent, and overtemperature.

It also has an integrated charging circuit that can perform constant current/constant voltage charging of the cells up to 6A, while performing balancing of the cells at 100mA. In addition, it functions as the main power switch of the longboard system, and includes a precharge circuit to limit inrush currents. Finally, the BMS does current measurements for coulomb counting, and performs state-of-charge calculations.

The project is shared in these GitHub repos:

• Hardware: battman-hardware
• Firmware: battman-firmware
• Software: battman-dashboard

Andrius has shared the board on OSH Park:

Battman lithium ion battery management system

@Michael Welling has created a small breadboard friendly development board using the SiFive FE310 RISC-V instruction set:

LoFive

Here is the LoFive compared compared to the Teensy 3.2:

The KiCad design files are available on GitHub:

mwelling/lofive

mwelling has shared the board on OSH Park:

Arduino Based TV Remote Project

A couple years ago my TV remote broke. I had used one of those universal remote phone apps as an alternative for a while, but that just got really frustrating. Without the tactile feel of buttons it was too easy to press wrong buttons on my smart phone; accidentally pressing mute, stop or changing the channel / input, etc.

I considered just ordering a cheap replacement remote off of Ebay for a few dollars but part of me wanted to take advantage of the situation and make one from scratch using the atmega328p chip used on the famous Arduino Uno.  I had been tinkering with the atmega chip quite a bit at the time and was also exploring the process of designing circuit boards using cad software.

I loved the idea of designing a circuit board from scratch & filling it with circuits. This seemed like the perfect project for me – being able to use my beloved arduino chip, design and populate a circuit board with circuits & fashion some kind of project case (altoids tin) to put it all in. I went for it.

If you've enjoyed @gamaral's electronics projects here (such as Canon DSLR WiFimote, Raspberry Pi PSU, Marshmallow Game Console) and on YouTube or when he co-hosts TWiT's FLOSS Weekly, then please consider giving to his  cancer treatment fund:

Gamaral's Cancer Treatment

I've unfortunately had to flip the bill for my two past surgeries and my on going cancer treatment... and as you can imagine, I'm running out of cash.

If you like my content and/or have found my published projects interesting or useful, please consider sending me some spare change and I'll be ever so grateful.

Tomorrow night, August 15th, is Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago!

Join @Drew Fustini, @Andrew Sowa, @Chris Gammell and more at St. Lou’s Assembly (664 West Lake Street):

@Alex Martin is creating a four legged robot with a running bound gait:

Mr. Runner

The aim of this project is to lower the barrier of entry into dynamic robotics. After seeing Boston Dynamic’s Wildcat I became interested in working on something similar, but was disappointed with what the hobbiest scene had to offer. They all used static locomotion. I wanted it to feel alive!

I hope that if people can see that this style of robotics is reproducible with basic development skills, it will attract a wider range of people to legged robots than just those who want to see a vaguely spider looking device re-implement the same kinematic equations over and over again.

The approach is based on the work of Fumiya Iida and Rolf Pfiefer at the University of Zurich in the mid 2000’s. Dr. Pfeifer is well known in the field of embodied cognitive science, and these experiments were an attempt to generate movement in quadruped robots based on those principles.

From MakersBox on Instructables:

Programmable POV Fidget Spinner

Fidget spinners are fun, and you can find one at about any check-out counter for just a few bucks these days, but what if you could build your own? And it had LEDs? And you could program it to say or show whatever you wanted? If that sounds geeky cool, THIS IS THE PROJECT FOR YOU.

I’ve always been interested in using blinking LEDs to get kids interested in programming. The most simple project with an Arduino microcontroller is to blink an LED on and off. Then you get them to see how fast an LED can blink before it looks like it is on continuously (about 12 millisecond intervals). Then you shake the LED back and forth and you can see it blink again! This phenomena is call “persistence of vision” (POV) and is how this project works. It can lead to discussions of both how the eye works and how incredibly fast computers are.

This project uses a programmable 8-bit microcontroller, eight LEDs, and a coin cell. It spins using a standard skateboard bearing, and uses a Hall-effect sensor and a magnet to determine rotation. It is made using beginner-friendly through-hole parts and can be programmed using the Arduino programming environment.

MakersBox has shared the board on OSH Park:

Geek Spinner 0.1

@Kris Winer designed this is a small 4-layer PCB for remote logging of absolute position and orientation:

Asset Tracker

STM32L433-based board with CAM M8Q concurrent GNSS, EM7180 + MPU9250 + MS5637 for absolute orientation, and an ESP8285 for wifi connectivity.

The board uses an STM32L433 Cortex M4F host programmable via the USB connector using the Arduino IDE and an Arduino core created by Thomas Roell . The absolute position engine is a UBLOX CAM M8Q concurrent GNSS module connected to the STM32L433 via UART. The CAM M8Q uses a chip antenna so no external wire or patch antenna is required resulting in a very convenient device package. The pcb is an integral part of the CAM M8Q antenna and the pcb has been sized to meet the minimum ground-plane size recommendations (20 mm x 45 mm).

The absolute orientation engine uses the MPU9250 accel/gyro/magnetometer IMU sensor plus the MS5637 barometer as slaves to an EM7180 motion co-processor that sends quaternions and drift-stabilized altitude to the host via I2C.

There is an Arduino library and sketch available on GitHub:

kriswiner/AssetTracker

PeskyProducts has shared the board on OSH Park:

AssetTracker.v02c

This is a special stackup intended for a variety of high-power and low weight circuit designs. This service features a 0.032″ (0.8mm) thick PCB, and includes 2oz (2.8mil, 70um) copper. That’s half the thickness of our standard boards, and with twice the copper!

2 Layer 2oz copper 0.8mm thickness PCBs

@GravitasTechnol tweeted:

Half-height PCBs from OSHPark will allow us to measure mag fields in tight gaps.

HackRF creator Michael Ossmann presented his simple RF design rules at a past Hackaday Superconference:

 

The video of Ossmann’s talk is well worth watching:

He shows how to calculate the width of RF traces  in order to match impedance [18:54]:

This is the current 4 layer board stackup for OSH Park:

From @Jonathan Cohen on @Tindie:

3D Scanner HAT for Raspberry Pi

3D Scanner HAT expansion board interface for Raspberry Pi running FreeLSS on the PICLOP ATLAS FreeLSS

I wanted to make a custom interface for use with the open-source 3D Scanning software, FreeLSS. I was very impressed with the Arduino-based Ciclop scanner and the Raspberry Pi-based Atlas Scanner. Several FreeLSS users merged the two scanner platforms, creating the PiCLOP 3D Scanner. However, there were few changes to the basic PCB design used for the scanner. I wanted to integrate the hardware functionality into a Raspberry Pi HAT format, with the inclusion of extra features for expandability — and who knows, other uses !

What makes it special?

• Conforms to the Pi Foundation specification for HATs !
• 5V power design (only a single voltage) allowing for Pololu low-voltage stepper driver carrier.
• Connections for up to two independent soft-PWM controlled LED light sources.
• I2C interface for OLED displays and light intensity sensors, e.g. TSL2561 or TSL2591.
• Serial communication breakout for console support.
• Additional GPIO signal breakouts for other sensors and devices.
• User-programmable EEPROM ! for auto-configuration and device overlays.
• Standard DC power connector for up to 5V 4A power supply and connections for power switch.
• Over-current protection by poly re-settable fuse.

From @Sven Gregori:

4chord MIDI

the USB MIDI keyboard dedicated to play all the four chord songs, from Adele via Green Day and Red Hot Chilli Peppers to U2 and Weezer. Thanks to MIDI, you can be any instrument – and all of them at once. Yay!

 Built around an AVR ATmega328 and Objective Development’s V-USB library, 4chord MIDI acts as a regular USB MIDI instrument. It supports playback in every key and five different playback modes:

• simple triad chord (root, third, fifth)
• triad chord + third + fifth + third as quarter notes
• triad chord + third + fifth + octave as quarter notes
• root note + third + fifth + third as quarter notes
• root note + third + fifth + octave as quarter notes

The playback tempo can be set between 60 and 240 bpm.

Here is the board in action:

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

sgreg/4chord-midi

Rene van der Meer designed this breakout board for a bare OLED display:

SSD1306 1.3″ OLED SPI breakout board

I’ve been playing with cheap OLED display breakouts for years, incorporating complete boards into my projects – an easy, but bulky solution. Now that I’ve had some practice designing circuits and PCBs, it’s time for my next challenge: soldering the display FPCs directly to my own boards.

I designed this board to try out a minimal circuit before integrating it into any larger projects, and to figure out the best way to solder flexible circuits to my boards. Since all of my new microcontroller-powered board designs only require 3.3 V, I haven’t added any 5 V tolerant level shifting. What’s left is a bare minimum circuit to drive a Solomon Systech SSD1306 using SPI at 3.3 V.

golemparts has shared the board on OSH Park:

SSD1306 SPI Breakout v1.0 A

Jerad Jacob designed this board to monitor and control a swimming pool:

Here-Be-Dragons/Pool-Controller

Cloud-based pump speed, solar collector controls, and temperature monitoring for your pool with SmartThings and Alexa integration

Timer Control of a Hayward Tristar VS Pump and Hayward GL-235 Solar Pool Controller

osmosis has shared the project on OSH Park:

Pool Controller v2.2

We’re looking for a variety of flex designs to test. The specs will be the same as our normal 2 layer service but on Kapton:

• 6 mil minimum trace width
• 6 mil minimum trace spacing
• 10 mil minimum drill
• 5 mil annular ring

Please send us an email with “flex” in the subject:

support@oshpark.com

@Piotr Esden-Tempski of 1BitSquared on Hackaday.io:

1Bitsy 1UP

1Bitsy 1UP is a retro inspired handheld game console, the design is based on the 1Bitsy STM32F415RGT6 ARM Cortex-M4F 168MHz 192kb RAM and 1MB Flash micro controller. 2.8″ TFT with capacitive touch, SDCard Reader and a few other components.

The display used is a TFT LCD with I2C CapTouch and ILI9341 driver. (should be compatible with the display sold by Adafruit on their breakouts as well as the buydisplay.com 2.8″ tft with CapTouch sensor)

The most basic design consists of:

• 1Bitsy STM32F415RGT6 (168MHz, 192kb RAM, 1MB Flash)
• 240×320 2.8″ TFT with capacitive touch and PWM backlight control
• D-Pad, ABXY, Start, Select buttons
• DAC audio out to headphones. (speakers optional)
• SDCard connected over SDIO interface

The hardware design files and firmware source code are available on GitHub:

1bitsy/1bitsy-1up

MP3 player design from Dooba.io:

Shiva: MP3 player for the masses

Based on the ioNode, Aecho and Nomad modules, the Shiva allows browsing & playing MP3 files stored on any FAT-formatted MicroSD card with audio quality up to 128Kbps.

The actual Shiva board itself is quite simple, featuring an MCP23008 from Microchip for reading the 7 buttons, a DM3D-SF MicroSD card socket from Hirose and a 128×64 OLED display from Adafruit.

To keep everything neatly together I needed an enclosure. Being lucky enough to own a half-decent 3D printer I decided to keep things minimal but functional. Who needs glue and screws when you can go for a press-fit case?

The code for the Shiva MP3 player is available in the Dooba Firmware SDK under /src/shiva. Schematic and board are available in the Dooba Hardware collection.

From @Nick Sayer of Geppetto Electronics on Tindie:

ATXMega32E5 breakout board

The ATXMega32E5 is the next step up for those experienced with the AVR series of microcontrollers from Microchip (formerly Atmel). They use the same compilers and libraries as the rest of the AVR 8- and 16-bit families, but they can run at 32 MHz and have an amazingly powerful set of internal peripherals that can take your projects to the next level and beyond.

For prototyping, however, the disadvantage is that the XMega chips are not available as through-hole parts. That’s where this breakout board comes into play.

nsayer has shared the board on OSH Park:

ATXMega_E5 breakout v1.0

nppc has shared this small and simple on-screen display (OSD) for monitoring battery voltage:

B-uOSD

Visit the GitHub repo for more information on the project:

nppc/B-uOSD

JinGen Lim created this beautiful project:

Building a PCB lapel

I had little experience with fabric, but building a lapel out of PCB seemed like something that might just work. PCBs are typically built with extremely high tolerances for its copper and mask layers and still acceptably accurate for the silkscreen.

@Sven Gregori created a KiCad component and footprint for the Nokia 5110 LCD and created this breakout board to test it:

Yet another Nokia 5110 LCD breakout board

I just shamelessly measured all there was to measure and created my own KiCad PCB footprint, along with a schematic component.

Once done, I needed a way to verify it would actually work and fit the LCD, so despite how pointless it is, I created my own breakout board as proof of concept and ordered it from OSH Park.

The Nokia 5110/3310 LCD component and footprint are available on GitHub

kicad-libs

sgreg has shared the breakout board on OSH Park:

Nokia 5110 LCD Breakout Board Rev.A

@Alexander Ryzhkov created a small 555 timer-based piano:

555 piano

Main goal of this project has been creating pretty designed 555 based piano in small form-factor. Many 555 piano are using 9V battery for supply. I use CMOS timer and for timer need only 3V supply.

The design files are available on GitHub

ChirnoTech/555Piano

Here is a video of the board in action:

openidev has shared the board on OSH Park:

piano.toplayer.zip

Brian Benchoff wrote on Hackaday about the amazing PCB artwork that he’s seen so far in 2017:

Hackaday Links: June 11, 2017

PCB art is getting better and better every year. This year, though, is knocking it out of the park. In March, Andrew Sowa turned me into money.

More recently, Trammell Hudson has explored the layers of OSH Park soldermask and silk to create a masterpiece.

Now, we’re moving up to full-blown art. Blake Ramsdell worked with OSH Park to create a full panel of art in gold, fiberglass, soldermask, and silkscreen. It’s 22×16 inches, and it’s fantastic.

David I. Herman just created a Facebook group for PCB paintings.

We're excited about this Raspberry Pi project from @Radomir Dopieralski:

Ye Olde Nowt

Yet another pi zero retro handheld game console.

Quantity	Component name
1	Raspberry Pi Zero
1	1.5″ SSD1351 Display Module
2	Small SMD Speakers
2	33nF SMD Capacitor
2	1µF SMD Capacitor
2	150kΩ SMD Resistor
2	270kΩ SMD Resistor
6	Buttons
6	90° Buttons
1	ZeroLiPO
1	1S LiPo Battery

We’re doing a Hack Chat today (Friday June 23rd) at 12:00 pm US PDT!

Friday Hack Chat: Perfect Purple PCBs

Every Friday, we gather ’round the hot air gun over on Hackaday.io, invite some cool people over, and get them to talk about what they do. This is the Hack Chat. It’s become a tradition, and already we’ve had a ton of awesome people walk through our doors.

This week, we’re inviting [Drew Fustini] and [Dan Sheadel] to talk about what OSH Park does, how they became the first place that comes to mind when you need a PCB. They’ll explain why the boards are purple, environmental regulations for PCB manufacturing in the US, shared projects and tips and tricks for creating the perfect board.

From Alex Wulff on Hackster.io:

MorseCard – A Tiny Telegraph Station

This small PCB lets you learn Morse code and communicate with friends. Set up a telegraph network in your very own home!

The source code is shared on GitHub:

AlexFWulff/MorseCard

AlexWulff has shared the project on OSH Park:

MorseCard LiPo

Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago was excellent this past Tuesday at Saint Lou’s!

Sebastian Gajate was in town all the way from Argentina and presented The Amp Hour host @Chris Gammell with his own fútbol jersey!

Thanks to @Andrew Sowa for bringing his camera and taking the above shot and many more wonderful photos. Bart Dring brought his latest CNC build: a drawing robot based on Line-us.

Here the draw bot in action:

Brian Rutkowski’s impressive LED spinner project was a crowd pleaser!

Watch more of the dazzling LEDs in this video:

The adorable Simula robot by Jamie Laing was another favorite:

Simula made several new friends:

We were excited to get a look at the purple PCB inside:

Andrew Sowa showed the results of his technique in KiCad for converting photos into PCB artwork

We were excited to meet Jose Ignacio Romero who had designed the Low Power Continuity Tester for the One Square Inch contest on Hackaday.io last year. He brought many projects to share including this color memory LCD board:

Peter Zieba of Analytics Lounge community lab demonstrated XRF (X-ray fluorescence)!

View more photos in these galleries:

• Hardware Happy Hour Chicago (June 2017)
• Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago in motion

The Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation fosters open source semiconductor design and we’re proud to have become a sponsor! Julius Baxter writes on the FOSSi Foundation blog:

OSH Park sponsors the FOSSi Foundation

We are pleased to announce that OSH Park, the purveyors of perfect purple PCBs, have become sponsors of the FOSSi Foundation’s activities. We are very grateful for their support and would like to recognize this by listing them on our Sponsors page at the Bronze tier.
We are actively looking for sponsors for the Foundation, if you’re interested in learning more about our activities and why we are looking for sponsorship, then please visit our sponsorship page and for more, see our detailed sponsorship proposal document.

More information on the FOSSi Foundation:

Inspired by the success of open source software, the Foundation will help bring about IP and tools of comparable quality to proprietary offerings, and which are developed according to an open source model by a highly collaborative and inclusive community. The FOSSi Foundation will address the issues the field currently faces; fragmentation, legal uncertainty, design quality, and high barriers to entry.

FOSSi has launched LibreCores:

gateway to free and open source digital designs and other components that you can use and re-use in your digital designs.

FOSSi also organizes the ORConf:

We’re pleased to announce that ORConf 2017 will be held between September 8th and September 10th in Hebden Bridge in the UK.

Past talks are on the FOSSi Foundation’s YouTube channel such as this introduction from last year (jump to 1:59):

Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago is 6:30pm tonight at St. Lou’s Assembly

with @Chris Gammell, @Andrew Sowa, @Drew Fustini and more!

June 3H Meetup

Just because we'll be talking hardware and electronics doesn't mean we can't do it on a patio on a summer evening, right?

Join us for a Hardware Happy Hour on Tuesday June 13th! We'll be at St Lou's Assembly on the back patio.
You've had a few months, so hopefully you have a new project you can bring and show off! If not, you have about 2 weeks to finish one to bring it with you. Hope to see you all there, please feel free to invite others!

We'll also be joined by Sebastian Gajate (@SGTECH) who will be in town from Argentina, doing a nerd tour of the midwest/east coast. Stop by and say hi and hear about the hardware culture in South America.

The Apertus° open source cinema team will be running a Surface Mount Technology (SMT) workshop at Maker Faire Berlin this weekend in their AXIOM booth #121:

Surface Mount Technology (SMT) Workshop

In the course of attending a lot of fairs and exhibitions, we’ve noticed that our cameras and components attract the attention of people from all walks of life. We’ve found that despite our reassurances, people discovering the world of Open Hardware tend to doubt their capabilities where soldering tiny components by hand is concerned.

This is why we hold Surface Mount Technology workshops – so that with a little confidence, the right tools and some initial guidance from members of our team, anyone can have great fun learning to make their own PCBs. The workshops are very popular and we have visitors designing pendants and earrings with colour LEDs and blinking patterns – which always creates a buzzing atmosphere.

apertus has shared the boards on OSH Park:

ART Base

ART Tear

ART Star

ART Diamond

From @MakersBox:

An “Unfortunate” SMD Project

If you like happy, easy to build projects, this is not for you. This is only for people who like to grind their teeth and pull out hair.

Here’s a video of the board in operation:

@Patrick Van Oosterwijck created this board to power the Raspberry Pi with a LiFePO4 battery:

LiFePO4wered/Pi+

Many IoT and other projects are based on the Raspberry Pi, but usually little thought is given to the power supply. Most project use generic cell phone adapters or USB power banks, which is fine for one-off projects where the duct taped parts and cabling don’t matter and it’s expected that SD cards will die because power was removed with the Pi running.

But when you need reliable non-stop operation for your prototypes, or you’re ready to turn your project into a good looking product, or you want to use different power sources such as solar, it’s time to look for a serious power manager for your Pi.

Built on the solid foundation of the #LiFePO4wered/Pi, this project provides Pi bootup and shutdown management based on button or touch, input voltage, battery voltage and time, all while making sure the Pi always performs a clean shutdown before power is removed.

The next Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago is Tuesday, June 13th, 6:30pm at St. Lou’s Assembly:

June 3H Meetup

Tuesday, Jun 13, 2017, 6:30 PM

St. Lou’s Assembly
664 West Lake Street Chicago, IL

Just because we’ll be talking hardware and electronics doesn’t mean we can’t do it on a patio on a summer evening, right?Join us for a Hardware Happy Hour on Tuesday June 13th! We’ll be at St Lou’s Assembly on the back patio.You’ve had a few months, so hopefully you have a new project you can bring and show off! If not, you have about 2 weeks to …

Check out this Meetup →

Here’s some photos from the previous meetups:

Learn how to design a simple add-on board for Raspberry Pi with KiCad in 20 minutes with this new tutorial from Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics:

Shine On You Crazy KiCad

This course shows how to make a custom but very simple piece of electronics for the Raspberry Pi platform. The primary purpose is to get users building something in KiCad as fast as possible.

The free course contains four videos:

• Designing a PCB in KiCad in 20 minutes

• Buying Components

• Assembling a simple circuit board with SMD components

• Writing code, blinking an LED with a Raspberry Pi

ChrisGammell has shared the board on OSH Park:

Shine

Open Panzer Sound Card

The Open Panzer Sound Card is a work in progress with the goal of bringing inexpensive, high quality, and open source sound functionality to RC models but especially to tanks using the Tank Control Board (TCB).
The board is actually made up of two components. First, an off-the-shelf PJRC Teensy 3.2 is used as the onboard processor. The Teensy is then plugged into a socket on our custom carrier board that adds a Micro SD card slot (max 32 GB), an additional 16 MB of flash memory, an LM48310 2.6 watt audio amplifier, and headers for external connections.

Resources

• GitHub Page
• A discussion thread on the development of this card can be found on the Open Panzer Forum.
• Eagle Board and Schematic (zip)
• Printable Schematic (pdf)
• Bill of Materials – PDF – Excel

From the @BeagleBoard Foundation blog:

Google Summer of Code project videos

Watch the introduction videos from our Google Summer of Code 2017 students including BeagleWire software support by Patryk Mężydło

Checkout project page more information on the cape:

BeagleWire

The BeagleWire is an FPGA(Lattice iCE40HX4k) development platform that has been designed for use with BeagleBone boards.

@Michael Welling has shared the board on OSH Park:

BeagleWire

Teensy creator Paul Stoffregen has shared a new project on OSH Park:

I/O Expander for LED Arcade Buttons

The Monolith Synth Project needed to use a large number of these LED lit arcade buttons.
Dimming of the LEDs was required. Initially I considered using this Adafruit 16 Channel PWM board. But the LEDs in these buttons have integrated resistors which require 12 volts, so 16 transistor circuits and another board for reading the switches would have also been needed.

It uses the same PCA9685 chip for 12 bit PWM control on every LED, with mosfet drivers to handle 12V outputs, and also a MCP23017 chip to read the buttons. Every button has a discrete 1K pullup resistor (rather than using the higher impedance on-chip pullups) to help with use in the same cable bundles cross coupling to 12V PWM signals.

Monolith Synth

Four of these boards where used in the Monolith Synth project:

The project is featured in this Tested video:

Thanks to everyone that came to Bring-A-Hack last weekend after Maker Faire Bay Area!

Here is a gallery of photos:

Bring-A-Hack after Maker Faire Bay Area 2017

People were quite impressed by this soldering handiwork by Mike Szczys of Hackaday. Mike also did a great job tweeting about all the wonderful hacks such as this care-free robot.

Follow #bringahack on Twitter to see more!

We’re excited that there will be a SupplyFrame Hardware Developers meetup next Thursday before Maker Faire Bay Area weekend:

Sensing Expansion

Thursday, May 18, 2017, 6:30 PM

Supplyframe SF Office, 500 3rd St STE230 San Francisco, CA

We’re having another meetup, this one right before the Bay Area Maker Faire weekend. That means we’ll have a mix of familiar and new faces at the event. We have some familiar and impressive speakers, as always.This month we’re pleased to welcome Jonathan Foote. He is a recovering scientist, tinkerer, and creative technologist with decades of hands…

Check out this Meetup →

We had a great time last year and recommend folks at Maker Faire Bay Area 2017 come to this Saturday night meetup hosted by Hackaday and Tindie:

The 4th Annual Hackaday x Tindie MFBA Meetup at O’Neill’s Irish Pub

34 South B Street, San Mateo, CA 94401

It’s Maker Faire Bay Area time of year again and we’re holding our 4th annual Hackaday and Tindie MFBA Meetup!
After a ridiculously fun Saturday at Maker Faire, carry on the festivities with us at O’Neill’s in San Mateo on Saturday night from 7pm.

Bring your finest blinky, flashy, IoT, hacks, wearables, or other techy items for us to paw. Bonus points if you bring your #HackadayPrize project for us to get super excited about.

We can’t wait to see you there or at the faire.

Space is limited, so get your foot in the door early. 21 or over only. Please bring ID.

Mesh networking board by Daniel on Hackaday.io:

Low-power mesh networking for small sensor grids

Tiny MQTT-interoperable broadcast mesh networking with simple radios
This project is a low-resource mesh networking stack and mote with battery-powered routers based on state synchronization. The target is for the stack to use less than 2kb SRAM. Nodes use low power listening and an adaptive gossip protocol to synchronize key/values pairs with each other without relying on explicit routing or per-node addressing.

For example, a light might transmit (/lamp, {“state”:”on”}) to the mesh. Write (/lamp, {“state”:”off”}) to the mesh, and the lamp application will notice. The powerful but simple state synchronization primitive allows you to update the state of the mesh to update the world, and update the state of the world to express the same on the mesh. Trivially bridged to a private MQTT server and managed with off-the-shelf MQTT applications.

The design files and source code are available on Bitbucket:

dholth/mesh

@blecky's latest project is an EEPROM/Flash emulator with a fun name:

EEEmu SPI

The EEEmu SPI emulates any Serial Peripheral Interface Bus EEPROM or Flash memory chipsets up to an interface speed of 25MHz. It also supports any supply and interface voltage between 1.8 to 5 Volts and can be configured to support even the largest of memory sizes.

This repository contains configurations for all the currently supported EEPROM and Flash chips for the EEEmu SPI:

EEEmu/Supported-Devices

From the Rebooting Electronics blog by Steve Mayze:

From Proof of Concept to Prototype

In the last entry for the Timed LED Lighting Controller, I realised that there are no working examples of an I²C driver for the ATtiny20. I then had to work through the data sheet to implement my own. With that done, I could then start on the application firmware and get the board really working. So this is where my proof of concept becomes the prototype.

SAMD21G18A Sensor Board with Color LED by Mike Rankin. The design files are source code available on GitHub:

SAMD21G18A_Sensor_Board_with_Color_Oled

Here’s a video of the board:

Shared project from Teensy creator @Paul Stoffregen:

Teensy 3.6 DIY Reference Board

A known good reference board for testing the MKL04 chip when building a DIY Teensy 3.6. Refer to this table for the differences between Teensy 3.6 and other models. The soldering friendly LQFP package (at least more friendly than BGA) is used on this board.

Parts Placement Diagram

Bill Of Materials

1   MK66FX1M0VLQ18
1   IC_MKL04Z32_TQFP32
1   USB A Connector
1   USB Mini B Connector
1   Micro SD Socket
1   MCP1825S Voltage Regulator
1   TPD3S014 USB Power Switch
1   Crystal, 16 MHz
1   Crystal, 32.768 kHz
3   Diode, Schottky, B120
1   Capacitor, 100uF, 6.3V
4   Capacitor, 4.7uF
10  Capacitor, 0.1uF
1   Resistor, 100K
2   Resistor, 470
2   Resistor, 220
2   Resistor, 33
1   Pushbutton
2   Test Point, Black

Join us for #BringAHack at BJ’s after Maker Faire on May 21st!

BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse

2206 Bridgepointe Pkwy, San Mateo, CA 94404

Sunday, May 21st, 6pm to closing

From the The Oddbloke Geek Blog, an EEPROM programmer shield designed for Arduino Mega:

Simple EEPROM Programmer … revisited

Some time ago, I wrote about my DIY EEPROM programmer driven by an Arduino Mega. It’s a very simple, low-tech project … but has attracted a consistently-high number of visitors to the site and is something I use several times a week.

Share this:

Castellations are small plated edges, typically used for making circuit boards into small PCB modules. These are often seen on wireless modules, such as the ESP8266-12E.

While we don’t offer full support for castellations, they can be fabricated if you don’t mind a few minutes of rework and verification of the PCBs.

Design Considerations

It’s helpful to include a fallback hole near the edge. The ESP8266-12E boards, are a great example here. The extra via allows easy connecting of wires for rework, and makes it easy to salvage a module if the fabricated PCB doesn’t turn out perfectly.

Success! Manual assembly of the KiCad-designed PocketBone by @Michael Welling with the Octavo Systems OSD3358 SiP (System-in-Package):

BGA achievement unlocked

Michael used vacuum pickup tool to manually place the components:

He then used Reflowster to reflow the solder paste:

Here is a video of the reflow process:

Check out the Hackaday.io project for more info:

Pocketbone KiCAD

The KiCad design files are available in the GitHub repo:

mwelling/pocketbone-kicad

mwelling has shared the board on OSH Park:

PocketBone KiCAD (OSHPark Edition)

Jeremy Cook writes on the Tindie blog about this IR receiver board by Atomsofttech:

SIS-2 Universal Remote Receiver

When you think of a “universal remote,” you generally picture an infrared (IR) emitter that can be setup to control your TV, AV receiver, and any other number of devices that work using IR signals. On the other hand, what’s to keep someone from doing the opposite, and having a universal receiver that can be programmed to accept codes from a remote that you just have lying around?

Watch the receiver board in action:

From K.C. Lee on Hackaday.io:

USB Packet Snooping

A low cost hardware dongle for capturing and analyzing Full Speed (12Mbps) traffic using ARM microcontroller

The board has been shared project by FPGA-Computer on OSH Park:

USB Snoop.brd

Radomir Dopieralski created this PCA9685-based servo shield for the OpenMV machine vision board:

Servo Shield for OpenMV

OpenMV has a couple of pins that you can use for connecting servos (for example, if you want to mount it on a pan-and-tilt base), but you can’t use those if you also want to use the WiFi shield or any other shield that uses up a lot of pins. Practically the only pins left to use are the I²C ones

deshipu has shared the board on OSH Park:

OpenMV Servo Shield

@kelu124 designed this board to add high-speed analog inputs to the Raspberry Pi:

20Msps+ ADC RaspberryPi extension

We haven’t tapped yet into the full potential of the Raspberry Pi in terms of ADC. Some have shown that the first gen of Raspberry could go to 10Msps [..] My take is that the new Raspberry Pi’s can surely go above. And I want to try it, either with this old CA3306E or with more recent kick-ass ADCs.

The design files are available on GitHub:

kelu124/bomanz

J.Rodrigo created this adapter board make it easier to flash a Game Boy cartridge:

Flash Memory Adapter for some Game Boy Cartridges

You only need to solder 3 or 4 wires and the adapter board to an old cartridge, PCB adapter boards are manufactured on OSH park to ensure the best quality of castellations.
Compatible Cartridges:

• DMG-A02-01: MBC5 + ROM (256/512/1024 KB) + RAM (32KB) + Battery
• DMG-A06-01: MBC5 + ROM (256/512/1024 KB) + RAM (8KB) + Battery
• DMG-A07-01: MBC5 + ROM (256/512/1024 KB)

JRodrigo has shared the board on OSH Park:

Flash Memory Adapter for Game Boy

From Brown Dog Gadgets in Milwaukee:

Crazy Circuits: Unique STEM Projects Delivered Monthly

Create fun STEM and STEAM electronics projects with parts delivered to your door.

Crazy Circuits is a non-soldering electronic learning platform that allows people to create circuits from almost any material they can imagine. Crazy Circuits are designed to pop onto LEGO™ bricks, enabling your LEGO™ creations to shine, move, and make noise. Use Crazy Circuits to construct paper crafts with conductive tape, use conductive thread for sewing, and create art with conductive inks and paints. You can even program sketches with Arduino compatible Crazy Circuits boards. No matter what you want to build, Crazy Circuits brings it all together.

@chmod775 designed this simple 3D Printed USB Connector compatible with PCBs from OSH Park:

3D Printed USB Connector

I’ve made this 3D USB Connector because I want to remove the chunky and complex standard metal USB Connector from my new upcoming project.

The design it’s made to be simple and with the height reference from the OSHP ark PCB’s.

From @Orlando Hoilett of Calvary Engineering:

Biomed Shield for Arduino 101

A sweet Arduino shield with a ton of cool sensors for physiological parameters such as heart rate and breathing rate

The features include:

• Heart Rate Monitoring with the MAX30101
• Pulse Oximeter with the MAX30101
• Electrocardiogram, Electromyogram, and Electrooculogram with our Super Simple EXG Circuit
• Bioimpedance with the AD5934
• Body Temperature with the MLX90614
• Ambient Light with a CdS Photocell
• Ambient Temperature with a Thermistor

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

CalvEngIO/BiomedShield

Darcy Neal will lead a workshop in Chicago on building your own synthesizer:

Build a Synthesizer with artist Darcy Neal

Saturday, Apr 15, 2017, 2:00 PM

Pumping Station: One
3519 North Elston Avenue Chicago, IL

We’ll learn about some of the building blocks of creating a synthesizer using the 4046 VCO and the classic 40106 CMOS ICs. The 4046 is a well documented and powerful IC that can be turned into a modular synth voice with just a few added components. Participants will learn to solder together their own prototyping PCB, build a circuit on a breadboard from a schematic, experiment with sensors, and learn the basics about how to produce custom circuit boards using design software like Kicad and Fritzing. No experience is necessary, but basic electronic knowledge or a strong interest in synths will be helpful.

Breakout board designed in KiCad to connect Pervasive Displays 2.15" E-Paper (E2215CS062) to Teensy 3.2 or Teensy LC. Based Teensy E-Paper Shield by @jarek319 in EAGLE.

The goal is to create a name badge that can be worn at conferences and Maker Faires. This board was the first step to verify the KiCad schematic and KiCad footprints work. More information will be posted as the badge project progresses.

OSH Park shared project

• E-Paper Breakout Board for Teensy

KiCad PCB design files:

• repo: pdp7/kicad-teensy-epaper
• commit: 54458f4
• requires KiCad library wickerlib by Jenner Hanni of Wickerbox Electronics for the 34-position FPC connector that the e-paper display plugs into:
  • CONN-HEADER-FH34SRJ-34S-0.5SH.kicad_mod

Bill of Materials (BoM)

• Digi-Key shopping cart

Source Code

• uses EPD215 Arduino Library by Jarek Lupinski for his E-paper Teensy Shield
• requires pinout modification:
  • EpaperQuoteDisplay.ino
  • EPD215 epaper( 17, 16, 14, 15, 13, 11 );

Photos

• Google Photos gallery
• images directory in github repo

Video

• YouTube: KiCad ePaper breakout for Teensy

Related: Jarek's ePaper Teensy shield

• OSH Park shared project: Teensy e-Paper shield
• My repo of Jarek's design files: TeensyEpaperShield

New OSH Park shared project from @Paul Stoffregen:

PT8211 Audio Shield

PT8211 is an inexpensive 16 bit stereo DAC.
This small breakout board connects the PT8211 to Teensy 3.2, Teensy 3.5 or Teensy 3.6.

This breakout board designed in KiCad makes it easy to put a rotary encoder and pull-up resistors on a breadboard. (Thanks to Enrico for the idea to add pull-up resistors).

The footprints on the back are meant for 1206 SMD resistors.

I choose 1K Ohm resistors, marked 102, when I assembled this board.

Additional photos are available in the GitHub repo’s images directory and in a Google Photos gallery.

Here is the OSH Park shared project for the board:

Rotary Encoder Breakout with Pull-ups

The KiCad design files are available on GitHub:

• pdp7/rotary-encoder-breakout

I used this KiCad symbol and footprint by Mike Cousins for a Sparkfun rotary encoder

• mcous/kicad-lib

I’ve verified that these rotary encoders fit:

• SparkFun Rotary Encoder (COM-09117)
  • Alpha 318-ENC130175F-12PS datasheet
• Bourns PEC12R-4220F-S0024-ND (DigiKey)
  • PEC12R series datasheet

I wrote this Arduino sketch to run on the Teensy 3.2. The brightness of one LED is controlled by the rotary encoder knob. The other LED is turns on when the rotary encoder knob is pressed down:

• rotary-encoder-test.ino

Here’s a video of the breakout board being used with a Bourns PEC12R-4220F-S0024 and Teensy 3.2:

Arkadi designed this interactive LED kit:

Trixel LED

Create your own interactive Light elements by soldering basic shapes, such as triangle, square, pentagon and hexagon to create an interactive LED sculpture.

Here’s a video of the Trixel LED boards in action:

The design files are available on GitHub:

arkadiraf/Trixel-LED

Arkadi_Raf has shared the boards on OSH Park:

Pentagon LED

Square LED

Triangle LED

Pidgeon 1 on Crowd Supply is a sub-GHz radio with 500 mW transmission power, RS485 networking interface and a STM32F0 microcontroller:

Crowd Supply: Pidgeon 1

No more restrictions from high level software! Access the lowest level of digital radio transmission with this programmable sub-GHz wireless module.

Hardware Specifications:

• Radio – CC1120 + CC1190
• Controller – STM32F051K6
• FTDI USB interface – FT234XD-R
• RS485 interface – LTC2850IDD
• Buck converter – RT8010GQW
• SMA connector for antenna

Hackaday wrote about a nifty hack by Joe Grand:

[Joe Grand’s] Toothbrush Plays Music That Doesn’t Suck

It’s not too exciting that [Joe Grand] has a toothbrush that plays music inside your head. That’s actually a trick that the manufacturer pulled off. It’s that [Joe] gave his toothbrush an SD card slot for music that doesn’t suck. The victim donor hardware for this project is a toothbrush meant for kids called Tooth Tunes.…

Joe published full documentation for the project on his website:

• Schematic
• Bill-of-Materials
• Assembly Drawing
• Source Code

The PCB is shared on OSH Park:

Tooth Tunes Hack

Joe describes the project in this video:

Hear the toothbrush in action:

Uri Shaked designed this heart-shaped flashlight PCB for his girlfriend’s birthday:

The design files are available on GitHub:

urish/heart-ariella

vladisenko designed this micro size flight controller board for Eachine E010 frame:

vladisenko/EachiWhoop

• Processor: STM32F103CB
• Gyro: MPU6500
• Receiver: Flysky AFHDS
• Weight: 1.44 grams
• Voltage: 1S Lipo battery input
• Firmware: patched Betaflight

Vladisenko has shared the board on OSH Park:

EachiWhoop

Note: choose “2oz 0.8mm” option.

Eric Brombaugh designed this ADC board for RF signals:

RXADC_14 Pmod

This is an ADC designed for use in digitizing RF signals with up to 40MHz bandwidth and 80dB SNR. The form-factor is compatible with a dual-connector Digilent Pmod so that it can be used with commonly available FPGA development boards to build a variety Software-Defined radio functions.

Features:

• ADC14C105 14-bit 105MSPS RXADC.
• Onboard 3.3V Regulator (5V input)
• Filtered Analog 3.3V Supply
• Onboard 80MHz clock oscillator
• Digilent-compatible 2-connector Pmod interface
• 50-ohm SMA input – 2.5Vpp ~= 0dBfs

emeb has shared the board on OSH Park:

14-bit 80MSPS ADC for SDR experiments

Andrew Sowa writes about the PCB he designed in KiCad to surprise @Benchoff last weekend at the Hackaday Unconference in Chicago:

Creating the Benchoff Nickel

I thought of making the Benchoff nickel after I saw Brian's Hackaday,io profile. He has a hi-res image of the center a Benchoff Buck which is well suited to being converted to a PCB. There is only a few colors and they have sharp edges. Bitmap2Component in Kicad, can easily detect these transitions and convert them into a footprint file. With the help of a text editor, I was able to manually layer everything into one complete image.

We are excited for the 2017 Open Hardware Summit this Fall in Denver, and we’re pleased to see the Ada Lovelace Fellowship is now open for applications:

Ada Lovelace Fellowship Applications Now Open

The Ada Lovelace Fellowship encourages women, LGBTA+, and/or other minorities in the open technology movement to both participate and nurture an incredible, diverse community within open source.

For the fifth year running, we are ecstatic to offer TEN (10) Open Hardware Fellowships to members of the community. This includes travel assistance and entrance to the 2017 open Hardware Summit!

We are at an exciting point in time for open source and hope to encourage everyone, no matter their walk in life, to embrace and participate in this incredible movement!

Joe Crop is a creating a real life version of this famous sci-fi device:

Star Trek Communicator Badge

In the true spirit of Star Trek, this communicator badge is completely autonomous, while fitting in the form factor of an original badge

Star Trek was known for dreaming up technology that was deemed nearly impossible given the limitations of the technology for the day. Having a small badge that could send audio across vast distances seemed out of the realm of possibility during the late 1980’s. This project’s aim is to use modern technology to provide nearly all the features of visionary tech

joecrop has shared the board on OSH Park:

Star Trek Communicator v2p1

Piotr Zapart designed this board to overcome range issues when using traditional 300 degree potentiometers or Hall sensors as rotational angle to voltage converters:

Hall Preamp/Analog axis calibrator

The idea was to create a device that will perform an axis calibration, usually done in digital domain, but before sampling the signal in the ADC, still in analog domain, using it’s advantageous infinite resolution

the main function of this device is to:

• Buffer the analog output signal coming from a potentiometer or another rotary angle to voltage converter like ie. Hall sensors.
• Filter out the high band noise and limit the bandwidth to an usable range only, protect the input against voltage spikes.
• Match the output voltage range of the source (pot/hall sensor) with the input range of the ADC, thus making the most of the available ADC resolution.
• Linearize the hall sensor output signal response by amplyfing it’s most linear region to the full scale ADC input range.

The board is shared on OSH Park:

HALL Preamp

@moosepr designed this small and simple GameBoy-style device using the Raspberry Pi Zero:

GameBoy Zero, but smaller!

I’m not overly fond of ‘rats nest’ wires, and I have a bit of an obsession with making things as small as possible, so this is what I came up with.

Tis just an ILI9341 screen, a Pi Zero, 2 navi switches (5 way), and a battery (with charge/protect circuit)

petay has shared the board on OSH Park:

GBz

Here the board is in action:

This is the third part of the meta-tutorial, where I talk about designing a cheap plant watering sensor. If you did not already read the first and second part, please do it now. These parts contain a lot information which lead to this point of the tutorial. The second part ended with step 14, designing a first prototype PCB.

via How to Design a Cheap Plant Watering Sensor (Part 3) — Lucky Resistor

Teensy creator Paul Stoffregen designed this board to momentarily disconnect a USB device:

USB Interruptor

This simple board plugs inline with a USB cable. It always passes the 5V power and normally passes the USB data signals. But when you press the button, the USB data signals are momentarily disconnected.

For the last few months I’ve been developing a USB Host Library for powerful but complex EHCI USB port in Teensy 3.6 [..] Reaching over to physically unplug the USB cable gets old quickly! Really, really old, both hands off my keyboard… right when trying to focus [..] I made this handy little board with a proper USB 2.0 high speed mux chip. The control signal is just 3.3V logic, so I might even wire it up to something to automate the process.

PaulStoffregen has shared the board on OSH Park:

USB Interruptor

kellbot writes on the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) blog:

The OSHWA Forums: Now Powered by Discourse

We are very pleased to announce that our new community forums are up and running. The discussion forums are powered by Discourse, which is easy to use, easy to maintain, and open source.

Among other new features, Discourse offers the ability to follow and reply to topics via email. This was one of the biggest reasons we decided to migrate our forums from their old home on bbPress. We’re hoping this will breathe some life into what has otherwise been an admittedly dormant part of the site.

Lucky Resistor designed this programming adapter for ATtiny13 and similar chips:

A Versatile ATtiny Programming Adapter

As mentioned in my article about designing a cheap plant watering sensor, I built a small adapter which can be used to pre-program the ATtiny13A. This is necessary, because once soldered on the board, I only have a debugWire interface, which has to be enabled first.

The adapter has a small 50mil JTAG header, where the Atmel ICE can be connected with the board. There is also room for a USB mini jack, which is used to power the MCU while programming. A small on-off switch is used to power the MCU and a LED is placed as indicator to see if the MCU has power.
One of the DIL/ZIF adapters is mounted on top of the female headers. Most of the adapters for SO-8, SO-14 and SO-16 will work with this board.

To make the board more versatile, I added a number of jumpers and solder points. By default, the adapter is connecting to the right pins for the ATtiny13A, but you can cut these routes and solder wires onto the board to implement any kind of connection you like.

The design files are available on GitHub:

LuckyResistor/ATtinyAdapter

LuckyResistor has shared the board on OSH Park:

ATtiny Adapter

We like the novel orientation of pogo pins that @Wing Tang Wong used in this board design:

ESP8266 Pogo Jig Programming Board

Upcycles D1 Mini Wemos board to create a USB connected ESP8266 Pogo pin jig

This is a board designed to take a WeMos D1 Mini board(with the ESP module removed) and use it as a USB interface with built-in reset/flash functionality for bare ESP8266 modules similar to the ESP-12 units.

The design files are available on GitHub:

ESP8266 Programming D1 Mini Pogo Jig V1

Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) had a track yesterday on Embedded Linux and video of the talks are on YouTube: Room 104 Friday Mar. 03 – SCaLE 15x

The video is a recording of the entire day of Room 104 so refer to the Friday schedule for information on the individual talks:

• Linux: the 1st second (after power on)
  • Alison Chaiken
  • 10:00am to 11:00am
• Groking the Linux SPI Subsystem
  • Matt Porter
  • 11:30am to 12:30pm
• [Lunch Break]
• Introduction to SoC+FPGA
  • Marek Vašut
  • 1:30pm to 2:30pm
• Introduction to USB
  • Alan Ott
  • 3:00pm to 4:00pm
• Getting off the grid, and onto the mesh!
  • William Turner
  • 4:30pm to 5:30pm

The 2017 Open Hardware Summit will be held on October 5th in Denver, Colorado:

Eric Brombaugh designed this breakout board for the Rafael Microelectronics R820T2 Advanced Digital TV Silicon Tuner chip:

R820T2 Breakout

This is the same chip used in most all of the RTL-SDR dongles, as well as the Airspy and numerous other radios. The chip is a versatile front-end with reasonable sensitivity and wide tuning range.

The design presented here is almost an exact implementation of the Mfg’s suggested demo design from the datasheet, implemented on the OSHpark 4-layer PCB process and provides a simple 4-pin interface with power, ground and I2C bus for controlling the tuner. A broad-band RF input and 10MHz IF output are provided on SMA connectors.

The breakout PCB design and STM32F0 firmware for the Rafael R820T2 tuner chip are shared on GitHub:

emeb/r820t2

emeb has shared project on OSH Park:

r820t2_breakout v0.1

From the Pluxx’s Magitech Golem Parts Emporium blog:

ISL12022M RTC breakout board

This is a breakout board for the Intersil ISL12022M real-time clock, with optional I²C pull-ups and a CR1225 backup battery. The circuit is based on the design recommended by Intersil, with a few tweaks. It’s the second board I’ve designed so far.

golemparts has shared the project on OSH Park:

ISL12022M RTC Breakout v1.0 A

From the Intelligent Toasters blog:

Retro CPC Dongle – Part 18

I’ve been working on, replacing the NAND raw flash with an eMMC chip on the CPC2.0 board.

I wrote about raw flash and the challenges of writing a flash translation later in part 16 of this series. After some research, I concluded that the eMMC interface looked exactly like the much more common SDCard interface, albeit that the interface can be run with an 8-bit width. SDCards are limited to 4 bits by the physical pin count. Taking a gamble I created a board to test this new eMMC chip. I created a fake SDCard!

This fake card allowed me to check very quickly if my assumptions were correct both at a hardware and a firmware level. I wanted to be sure that it was possible to interface the eMMC via 4 bits, rather than the full 8 bits and be sure the firmware instructions were the same between these two technologies.

Intelligent-Toasters has shared the board on OSH Park:

emmc.zip

I designed this simple breakout board in KiCad to make it easier to put a rotary encoder on a breadboard. The KiCad symbol and footprint for the SparkFun rotary encoder was created by mcous on GitHub. I used an updated version with corrected pin numbering.

Bill of Materials:

• SparkFun Rotary Encoder (COM-09117)
  • Alpha 318-ENC130175F-12PS datasheet
• 1x3 0.1" Male Header
• 1x2 0.1" Male Heade

The design files are available on GitHub:

pdp7/rotary-encoder-breakout

The board is shared on OSH Park:

SparkFun Rotary Encoder Breadboard Adapter

KiCad project leader Wayne Stambaugh talked at FOSDEM 2017 about KiCad’s current status and future roadmap:

KiCad Project Status

Wayne’s slides are available on Google Drive:

Tomasz Wlostowski of CERN talks about the SPICE integration that was added to KiCad in 2016:

Integrated Spice Simulation

Maciej Sumiński walked through the KiCad source code:

Diving into the KiCad source code

PDF of the slides is available for download:

The Open Hardware Association announced today that the Open Hardware Summit 2017 will be in Denver on October 5th!

We hope to see you all there!

Black Mesa Labs created this board that adds a Lattice FPGA to a Raspberry Pi:

IceZero FPGA Board for RaspPi

BML has been very much enchanted with the Lattice FPGA boards for Raspberry Pi, IcoBoard , BlackIce and IceHat. The IceZero board is a BML creation that attempts to combine the best features of all 3 boards into a single design.

IceZero features common with other designs

• Fully Open-Source Hardware and Software Design.
• Lattice ICE40HX4K FPGA that supports Clifford Wolf’s Project IceStorm tool chain.
• Interfaces to Raspberry Pi 2×20 GPIO Header for both power and bus interfaces.
• PROM programmable directly from Rasp Pi, no JTAG programmer required.
• External SRAM, supporting soft CPU core designs ( code execution ).
• Extra large SPI PROM, supporting soft CPU core designs ( code storage ).
• Industry standard PMOD expansion headers

IceZero features that are BML specific

• Mesa Bus Protocol 32 MHz SPI link between CPU and FPGA.
• 2-Layer PCB design. Orderable via OSH-Park or Gerbers for Downloading.
• FTDI 1×6 USB Serial Cable header for use with PC instead of Pi ( or as a soft CPU debug Trace Port ).
• Single Pi UART plumbed to FPGA for muxing to multiple external serial devices.

BlackMesaLabs has shared the board on OSH Park:

bml_ice_zero_19_02.zip

BML IceZero Lattice ICE40 FPGA for RaspPi

@Neven Boyanov has launched a new Tinusaur campaign on IndieGoGo:

Learn, Teach and Make with the Tinusaur

Small microcontroller board that could run Arduino and help you learn, teach others and make thing

The Tinusaur is powered by the Atmel ATtiny85 microcontroller

We want to bring the cost down to $3 for the basic “lite” boards and allow more people to be able to get them.

@Adam Fabio created this analog gauge to show your computer’s CPU utilization:

Analog CPU Gauge

The goal of this project was to build an analog gauge to display computer CPU utilization. I’ve always been fond of classic analog gauges. Most CPU Gauges are either digital on screen displays, or implemented with an LCD mounted in a drive bay

The goal of this project was to build an analog gauge to display computer CPU utilization. I’ve always been fond of classic analog gauges. Most CPU Gauges are either digital on screen displays, or implemented with an LCD mounted in a drive bay.

I’d always wanted a CPU gauge for my computer. Ok, and a bandwidth gauge for my router. You name it, I want a nice analog gauge for it. It always seemed a bit silly to use an true galvanometer based analog gauge for signals that are inherently digital.

The board is available on Tindie:

Analog Gauge Stepper Breakout Board

Tiny stepper motors for analog gauges and the like!

@Yin Zhong designed this dev board for Cypress FX2LP microcontroller:

μ-68013: a High Speed USB2.0 MCU breakout

Cypress’s FX2LP (CY7C6801x) is one of the smallest footprint MCUs that offer a high-speed USB (480 Mbit/s) device peripheral with built-in PHY (many others lack the PHY!). It contains a 8051 core for bookkeeping and setting up data streams through its hardware multiplexed parallel FIFO interface to/from an external processor, be it MCU, DSP, or FPGA/CPLD.
This is a breadboard-friendly minimal system PCB for CY7C68013 in QFN56 package. It integrates 3.3 V power supply, core clock, reset circuit/button, and I2C EEPROM (the MCU does not have built-in flash). It breaks out all IO pins through 2 rows x 20 pins 0.1″ pitch headers with 0.7″ row spacing.

summivox has shared the board on OSH Park:

20170112-0057 CY7C68013-v1.0.zip

@riktw designed this small and efficient lab power supply:

VederPSU

The VederPSU is a project to design a small, efficient lab power supply that is comparable to a commercial lab PSU in terms of power output, regulation and noise.

Our holiday special is here to stay – choose our fast-turn super swift service for only an additional $5/sqin!

2 Layer Super Swift Service

Need 2-layer boards in a hurry? Our Super Swift Service has the same quality you know and love, with an even faster turn time of 5 business days.

Pricing

In order to make the Super Swift Service more accessible to makers, hobbyists, and small businesses, we’ve reduced the price of the swift service from a flat fee per design to $10 per square inch, which includes three copies of your design. For the vast majority of orders, this should be a MUCH better deal.

For example, a 2 square inch board would cost $20 and you’d get three copies of your board. This includes our Free Shipping option, although expedited shipping options are available.

Turn Times

Orders are sent to fabrication daily, and will ship within 5 business days days.

You can get a quote, approve a design, and pay for an order at OSH Park.

Super Swift Service is not available for Medium Run or Four Layer orders.

As a special bonus, orders placed before 11AM US/Pacific on Monday will ship by Friday of that week.

90% of the time, orders placed before 11AM US/Pacific will ship in 3 business days, but we only guarantee 5 business day shipping.

Specs

• 6 mil minimum trace width
• 6 mil minimum trace spacing
• 13 mil minimum drill
• 7 mil annular ring
• PCB thickness of 1.6mm (.063”)
• 1oz copper on both sides (1.4mil, 35um)

Image source: Wikipedia

@Radomir Dopieralski designed this board to add buttons and a small joystick to the WeMos D1 Mini:

D1 Mini X-Pad Shield

This shield for the D1 Mini ESP8266-based development board adds a joystick and three buttons, so that you can implement menus or games on your device easily.

deshipu has shared the board on OSH Park:

D1 Mini X-Pad

We advise generating logos with a dots per inch (DPI) of less than 400 and a corresponding pixel height of 2.5 mil to be sure the logo will be included and printed correctly.

Background

Eagle’s “import-bmp.ulp” script and other bitmap converters often render a logo as a very high-DPI image, consisting of thousands of tiny pixels. In many cases, the image is around 10,000 DPI, corresponding to pixels smaller than one mil in height.

Our process is not properly equipped to handle features of that size, so we cannot guarantee that they’ll be printed correctly on the final board. The maximum DPI we can correctly process is 500 DPI, corresponding to pixels of 2 mil or larger. Images at a higher DPI may be be printed on the board incorrectly, or omitted entirely. Due to the complexities of bitmaps through fabrication, we advise keeping images to a DPI of under 400 and a corresponding pixel height of 2.5 mil.

If the imported bitmaps fails to appear on the website, or no silkscreen appears at all, then look below for possible resolutions. If you’ve verified that your board is under 500 DPI (preferably under 400), then try uploading the gerber files. Eagle can be very slow to render complex images, which results in our server giving up on that layer.

Note for other design tools

While this guide is geared toward Eagle, the general principles apply equally to any other bitmap converters. In some cases, the design tool may not be particularly helpful in detecting these errors. In those cases, we suggest using GerbV to examine the gerber files for possible line width and polygon height issues.

Detecting problems inside Eagle

After importing an image, you’ll want to select the Move tool, then right click on one of the imported objects, and select the Properties option.

Inside the Properties window, you’ll see the Height. Since the fab can operate at up to 500 DPI, the corresponding Height property would be 2 mil or larger. If you have a Height of less than 2 mil, then the imported image may not work correctly.

Correcting the issue inside Eagle:

There are several methods of correcting the issue inside Eagle, and the ideal method depends on the complexity of the image, the source format, and the importance of the image being printed correctly.

Option 1: Ignore the issue, and submit the gerbers.

If the image is non-critical, or the other methods seem too complicated, this is usually an acceptable solution. While we cannot guarantee high-DPI bitmaps will be printed correctly, the fabs usually will print them correctly. However, if you’re unlucky, then the image might be partially printed, or omitted entirely.

For this option, it’s advised to generate your own gerbers instead of submitting the BRD file. Eagle can be very slow to render imported bitmaps, and our server may time out and result in an error message or a missing layer.

Option 2: Trace the image using the built in tools.

This is the option suggested by Eagle when you first run the Import Bitmap script, and is typically easy to do on simplistic images and text.

Using the Wire, and Polygon tools, trace the image using the imported layers as a reference. Note, that due to how Eagle generates Polygons, you’ll want to set the Width property of any Polygons to 2 or 3 mils. If the Width property is lower than 2 mil, then Eagle will produce the same problematic gerbers that you’re trying to avoid.

For reference, the following text contains the suggestions from the import-BMP script.

This ULP generates a SCRIPT file that draws rectangles of successional pixels with identical color.

These rectangles serve as templates in order to draw the image with EAGLE commands like POLYGON, WIRE, CIRCLE, TEXT.

Please note: If the generated rectangles are smaller than the half of the resolution of the output device, (depending on the scale factor: screen: pixel, printer: diameter of the laser beam or ink jet dropplet), it is not possible to display the result. Therefore use the EAGLE commands mentioned above to reduce...

Read more

Yin Zhong designed this solution to use high-end studio headphones with his computer:

Making Myself a USB DAC + Headphone Amp

I need a DAC for my AKG K702. However, the more I looked at commercially available a.k.a. “audiophile” products, the more snake oil I smell. So even before I ordered my CEntrance DACPort Slim, I was already looking into how I can reinventing the wheel

I use OSHPark for prototyping PCBs. I decided to use their 4-layer FR-408 stackup simply for an un-broken ground layer. Turns out that the analog signals can easily fit on the top layer, so I allocated the power layer to the negative rail, and the bottom layer to positive rails.

The DAC + Filter module works! It produces reasonably clean line-level audio signal as expected.

We’re huge fans of Sparkfun’s old school ProtoSnap kits. These include a small support tab with traces running between different sections of the board. They’re great for kit designs, allowing for both immediate out-of-box functionality, and eventual customization.

Due to our shipping and panelization process, this type of board is not fully supported, but can be fabricated with careful consideration and experimentation.

Design Considerations

These designs are almost always unique, since the number of shapes, sizes, and orientation varies wildly. The design also may need adjusting based on the intended user.

in orientation, intended usage, and shape. As a result, a bit of experimentation is always going to be required. However, here’s a few design tips to get things going.

• Always ensure that after snapping, you can connect the boards together easily. A small header pinout near the tab works most of the time, but some designs might work best with a special connector.
• Tab width is critical. If the tab is too narrow, it will not hold the board together well. Too wide, and it becomes difficult to break apart. 3–5 trace/hole pairs works best.
• Hole size / pitch. The best tabs have between 20–30 mil of material between the holes. A hole size of 25 mil generates pretty good tabs.
• Design permitting, having multiple tabs with 2–3 holes is better than one huge tab with 6 or more connections.
• Adding traces on both top and bottom of a tab is likely to result in difficult snapping. Consider instead using more tabs, or adding instructions to score the traces.
• Tab and board placement: Remember that your users has to remove these! If the boards are badly positioned, the tabs aren’t “snapped” as much as they are “twisted”. This can result in unusual failures.

Designing for Failures

Since these typically are for kits, the most likely failure that will occur is a pulled up trace. This is when the trace on the two boards doesn’t break, and starts pulling up traces inside your layout. Not good. Fortunately, the design can account for this in several ways.

Any of these techniques will generate a “stress concentration point” for a pulled up trace. This will cause a the trace to tear in a well-defined place, ensuring that it won’t affect your board.

The simplest one simply having vias near the tab, as seen on the sparkfun board above. A ripped up trace will usually break at the edge of the via pad.

Another option is to actually narrow the trace near the board edge. This takes up less space than a via, but still provides a good weak point in a desirable location. However, make sure you don’t go too far below the design rules!

The last option is less ideal, but may suit certain layouts. Simply jog the trace, creating a 90* bend or two.

Indicating on the design

Here’s the measurements on our typical support tabs. Your design may require different configurations, so these are a rough guideline.

Typical tabs have the following features

• 20–25 mil drill hits
• 20–25 mil between the edge of the drilled holes
• roughly a 40 mil drill pitch
• 2–5 holes per tab (3–4 recommended)
• Holes tangent to the original board outlines

Note, the milling tool will add a 34 mil corner radius on the tabs. As a result, you can place the outermost holes tangent to the tab edge.

Failure modes (and how to cope)

• Pulled up traces? Need to add a break closer to the edge, or score the board before snapping. Try to handle this on a design revision before a full kit.

See our Tips and Tricks page for more

thingSoC is an Open Source socket system for IoT development and has just launched a new Crowdy Supply campaign:

thingSoC “Grovey”

Build any IoT or Networked device you can imagine!

The thingSoC Grovey! platform gives you the freedom to choose from hundreds of existing sensors, actuators, and radios to quickly create new electronic systems, in plug together configurations that were not possible before. Easily mix together different CPUs, Radios, and Peripherals, like Servos, Motors, Relays, Sound and Lights, and then program them in your choice of Integrated Development Environments (IDE).

The thingSoC Grovey! series combines access to the Seeedstudio Grove system, and the Mikrobus “Click” system, to give you the widest selection of radios, sensors, and actuators available today.

The thingSoC Grovey Series files are available on GitHub:

• TSOC_Teensy3x: Teensy3.x Adapter for the Grove System
• TSOC_GROVEY_ONE: Model “Uno” Arduino Clone for the Grove System
• TSOC_GROVEY_FOUR: Model “Four” PSoC4 mini for the Grove System
• TSOC_GROVEY_WIFI: ESP8266 Wi-Fi Adapter for the Grove System
• TSOC_GROVEY_I2CHUB: I2C Hub/Switch for the Grove System
• TSOC_GROVEY_GPIO: SX1509 GPIO for the Grove System
• TSOC_GROVEY_UART: USB to UART for the Grove System

All of our boards are manufactured in the United States and we will be operating on a normal schedule during Lunar New Year:

Shipping Information and Turnaround Times

There are two periods of time to think about when making your order:

• Fabrication time between when you place your order and when we receive boards from the fab.
• Shipping time between when we ship and when the post office delivers your order to you.

All PCBs ship from Lake Oswego, Oregon, and are fully manufactured in the United States.

From the Hackaday blog:

Ice, Ice, Radio Uses FPGA

Building a software defined radio (SDR) involves many trades offs. But one of the most fundamental is should you use an FPGA or a CPU to do the processing. Of course, if you are piping data to a PC, the answer is probably a CPU. But if you are doing the whole system, it is a vexing choice.

The FPGA can handle lots of data all at one time but is somewhat more difficult to develop and modify. CPUs using software are flexible–especially for coding user interfaces, networking connections, and the like) but don’t always have enough horsepower to cope with signal processing tasks (and, yes, it depends on the CPU).

[Eric Brombaugh] sidestepped that trade off. He used a board with both an ARM processor and an ICE FPGA at the heart of his SDR design. He uses three custom boards: one is the CPU/FPGA board, another is a 10-bit converter that can sample at 40 MSPS (sufficient to decode to 20 MHz), and an I2S DAC to produce audio. Each board has its own page linked from the main project.Z

The iceRadio project page has additional details:

• RXADC Board – 40MSPS 10-bit ADC for capturing HF-band RF signals.
• STM32F303 and ice5 Board – MCU and FPGA which implement the digital receiver.
• I2S DAC PMOD – Used for stereo audio output of demodulated signals.

Design files and source code are available on GitHub:

emeb/iceRadio

FacelessTech designed this small board to act as a surface-mount edge connector:

SMD edge connectors

So you want to joint two boards together, You decide to use through hole female and male 2.54 pitch headers. Normally you would use through hole than ether have a 90 degree headers or just bend them over. For years this is how I did it, I would have to make sure I made sure the holes were just the right distance from the edge of the board.

The KiCad design files are available on GitHub:

facelessloser/smd_edge_connectors

@David Kuder designed a SCSI device emulator with a Teensy 3.5 & NCR 5380:

Tiny SCSI Emulator

SCSI target emulator based on the Teensy 3.5 (Kinetis MK64FX MCU) and classic NCR 5380 SCSI PHY. Supports multiple targets (Device IDs), LUNs, and device types. 3.2″ x 1.6″ footprint, optionally uses or provides bus termination power. 64×48 pixel OLED status display.

The design files and source code are available on BitBucket:

tinyscsiemulator

Edgar implemented capacitive touch sensing using an ATTiny4 to create a touch paddle for Morse code:

Tiny CW Capacitive Touch Paddle

Like many no-code operators, after being on the air for a while, I developed an interest and appreciation for Morse Code [..] I purchased a cheap paddle, but I found the clicking noise a little bit annoying.

The goal of this project was to create a single PCB with an ATTiny4 AVR, a battery, transistors and a 3.5mm connector jack. The paddle is designed to have exposed conductive material in order to read the capacitive touch.

The under 1kB binary code worked well and without error. This made me wonder how small I could make this code. After optimizing the code, I managed to shrink it to under 512 bytes.

From the Rebooting Electronics blog:

“Mocking” – Minimising Risk

The goal is to have as few spins of the board as possible and the process of mocking the board was a huge help

@Robert designed this upgrade for a cheap TP4056 Li-Ion charger board:

TP4056 3V3 load share addon board

I wanted to have a load sharing for my future battery operated project with the ability to charge the battery. There is a load of cheap TP4056 boards from China. None of them has the load sharing or voltage regulator on board so I made my own addon board.

Smrtokvitek has shared the board on OSH Park:

3V3 load share for TP4056 v1.1

@Robert designed this upgrade for a cheap TP4056 Li-Ion charger board:

TP4056 3V3 load share addon board

I wanted to have a load sharing for my future battery operated project with the ability to charge the battery. There is a load of cheap TP4056 boards from China. None of them has the load sharing or voltage regulator on board so I made my own addon board.

Smrtokvitek has shared the board on OSH Park:

3V3 load share for TP4056 v1.1

Alan Mitchell designed this board to interface 1-wire sensors to a Raspberry Pi computer:

USB-to-1-wire Interface

This board is part of Alan’s Raspberry Pi data collection system:

Mini-Monitor

The Mini-Monitor software is data acquisition software that runs on a Raspberry Pi computer. It is designed to post the collected data to the BMON web-based sensor reading database and analysis software, but the software can be modified to post to other Internet databases. The Mini-Monitor software has the ability to collect data from a number of different sources

Jakub Polonský of Kaktus Circuits designed this linear virtual ground with OPA548:

Virtual Ground

Virtual ground, also called “rail-splitter”, is a device that creates a midpoint, whose voltage is (plus + minus)/2 and is capable of both sinking and sourcing current.

kaktus has shared the board on OSH Park:

Virtual ground 3.1

Barbouri has updated his voltage reference board design:

Quad Voltage Reference

This is my version 2 board update, which incorporates supply voltage regulation, over-current protection, and trimmer for the 5.000 volt reference all on the same board.

The new board uses a LM2937IMPX-10, which is a positive linear voltage regulator IC with a 10V output at 400mA in a SOT-223-4 package.

Barbouri has shared project the project on OSH Park:

Vref-4 Version 2.0 ext Pwr

Thanks to facelesstech for tweeting this design tip:

svg2mod by mtl is a small program to convert Inkscape SVG drawings to KiCad footprint module files:

SVG graphics in KiCad (svg2mod)

There didn’t seem to be a good way to get vector graphics into Pcbnew, so I wrote a small utility that uses an existing SVG library to read files, and then writes them out as KiCad modules.

The project is hosted on GitHub:

mtl/svg2mod

It uses cjlano’s python SVG parser and drawing module to interpret drawings and approximate curves using straight line segments. Module files can be output in KiCad’s legacy or s-expression (i.e., pretty) formats. Horizontally mirrored modules are automatically generated for use on the back of a 2-layer PCB.

Carlos Vadillo and Bx Dawes created the GlowSaber project to help kids in Alameda learn about physics, engineering and programming:

Building the GlowSaber main board

All the logic, sound and light effects of the GlowSaber are performed by a small microprocessor board. In this tutorial I will explain, step by step how to put together the main board of a GlowSaber.

Building the GlowSaber handle

One premise that I had while designing the GlowSaber was that I should be able to build all of it with tools that I already have. That limited the materials I could choose to those that I could cut, drill and glue with just the basic tools:

GlowSaber RGB LED assembly

The GlowSaber uses a Vollong 3 watts RGB LED. It is very bright and more than enough to light the length of the blade. When designing the GlowSaber I found that I needed a way to connect the LED to the main PCB and I designed a LED break out

How to use a potentiometer to change the behavior

The GlowSaber has a switch assembly, that controls the on/off functions. It also has a LED to show that the GlowSaber is ready to start, and finally has a small 1 kΩ potentiometer. The following is a schematic of the switch assembly:

cvadillo has shared the board on OSH Park:

GlowSaber

@askoog89 saw a major flaw with many LED watches – you have to press a button to see the time:

A Watch

I tried fix that problem by using a tilt switch to active the LED showing the time when tilt your arm to look at the watch

The watch uses the low power MSP430G2211 MCU from Texas instruments to control the LED and mesure the time with the help of a 32kHz watch cristal. The MCU sleeps most of the time only waking up ones a second to count up the time and check if the tilt switch is active. To show the time the watch uses 12 charlieplexed orange LEDs.

@Nick Sayer created this simple desk clock that gets time from GPS:

GPS Clock

GPS is best known as a ubiquitous, accurate poitioning system (obvious from the name), but the way it actually works requires distributing hyper-accurate time information. This makes it possible (and, actually, pretty easy) to make a clock that you never have to set as long as it gets good GPS reception.
Yes, this is way overkill… but GPS is getting so cheap that you might as well.

The source code is available on GitHub:

nsayer/GPS_clock

Nick has hacked together a tenth digit for the clock:

Here is a video of the GPS clock in slow motion:

Extreme Electronics designed this easy-to-build solenoid engine:

Acrylic Solenoid Engine

I’ve always loved solenoid engines. The first one I built was many,many years ago out of Mechano. Many others have followed since, But they always ran badly and only for a short while as the accuracy of the construction medium was poor. I am not a metal worker, making a “proper” engine out of cast pieces is out of my (and many other peoples) capabilities.
With modern laser cutting it is easy to make accurate components, it is relatively cheap and fairly quick.
So the Acrylic Solenoid Engine came into being

The initial driver is using a small PIC 12F675 and and an IR detector to give me pulse timing information from the solenoid. I went the IR sensor route rather than a mechanical switch so there was no rubbing parts that could wear as acrylic is rather soft. To get a good timing signal aluminum foil is placed on one side of the flywheel to give a good reflection back to the IR emitter receiver pair on the PCB.

Synchro Labs created this project to demonstrate the use of the Synchro mobile app platform with custom hardware:

Drinkro Cocktail Robot

based on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and a custom-designed hardware board used to control four DC liquid peristaltic pump motors using two L293D dual H-bridge ICs

Hardware design files are available on GitHub:

SynchroLabs/DrinkroHardware

Video of Drinkro in action:

@Kris Winer of Pesky Products designed these easy-to-program, high-performance and low-power dev boards:

Arduino-programmable Cortex M4F Development Boards

Program an STM32L4 Cortex M4F with the Arduino IDE via USB

Technical specifications of the Butterfly and Ladybug STM32L4 dev boards:

• Microcontroller: STM32L4 ARM Cortex M4F
• Clock speed: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 80 MHz
• Operating voltage: 3.3V
• I/O pin limits: most pins 5.0 V tolerant, 20 mA
• Digital I/O pins: 22, with 11 PWM (Butterfly), 13, with 10 PWM (Ladybug)
• Analog input pins: 6 (Butterfly), 5 (Ladybug), 12-bit ADC channels
• Analog output pins: 2 12-bit DAC
• RTC: 1 ppm accuracy
• Flash memory: 256 KB
• SRAM: 64 KB
• Voltage regulator: 3.3-5.5V input / 3.3V, 150 mA output

New Butterfly and Ladybug add-on boards

To the left is an MPU9250 accel/gyro/magnetometer motion sensor and the BME280 pressure/humidity/temperature sensor
To the right is an ESP8266 wifi-enabled add-on board for Butterfly

Ladybug environmental data logger

Reading the BME280 and VEML6040 sensors at 0.5 Hz and outputting pressure, temperature, humidity, altitude, RGB light intensity and RTC time and date to the Sharp memory display

Simple designs make hardware customization easy

Flight Controller:

STM32L432 receives quaternions from the EM7180, which itself is master to the motion and pressure sensors, GNSS data from the CAM M8Q, then processes and packages the data and sends it to the ESP8285 via UART bridge for transmission to a hand-held controller

Industrial Diagnostics:

uses an STM32L433 as master to several slave sensors to detect and process signals from industrial equipment and report to a remote server via blue tooth

Elkim Roa of OnchipUIS presented recently at the 5th RISC-V Workshop on the latest news of the Open-V open silicon microcontroller and their YoPuzzle educational platform:

YoPuzzle: A mRISC V development platform for next generations

Slides from the his talk:

Live Demos Over the Internet

You can now program real Open-V dev boards from anywhere in the world and see the results on a live video feed! Here’s our first demo – blinking the dev board LEDs.

Go to http://onchip.uis.edu/ to remotely program the demo board:

Electro_pet by Facelesstech

I got inspiration for this project from the petduino. The petduino is a great project to get kids into coding and electronics. I thought I would have a go and see if I could add some more features to it. Also my daughter was really interested in the 8×8 led matrix

Hardware walkthrough video:

Video of Santa hat and breathalyzer hat for the Electro Pet:

Design files and source code are available on GitHub:

facelessloser/electro_pet

facelessloser has shared boards on OSH Park:

electro_pet

santa_hat_rev_b

SUMP2 – 96 MSPS Logic Analyzer for $22

Black Mesa Labs has an ongoing mission to develop easy to use and fully capable open-source hardware and software tools that make engineering electronics easier

Video of SUMP2 logic analyzer:

BlackMesaLabs has shared an adapter board on OSH Park:

sump2_5vto3v_dip_01.zip

5V Input Adapter for the $22 SUMP2 iCEstick 96 MSPS LogicAnalyzer

@Daniel Grießhaber created this convenient tool to test your WiFi Security against attackers:

ESPTool

Demonstrate how easy it is to crack a WiFi Password or jam your WiFi so you can’t access the internet. Designed for education and self-tests.

ESPTool has the following hardware:

• SSD1306 based OLED Display, connected via I2C
• microSD Card Socket connected over the SPI interface
• 3 general purpose buttons
• ESP8266-12E Module
• TPS63031 Buck-/Boost-Converter with an input range from 1.8V – 5.5V
• MCP73831 Single-Cell LiPo Charger Chip
• CP2012 USB to UART converter Chip

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

dangrie158/ESPTool

@al1 created this remake of the old Texas Instruments TIL305 display with tiny surface mount LEDs:

reDOT

TIL311 had a alphanumerical brother the TIL305. This was a 5×7 LED matrix in the same form factor

Here is a video of reDOT in action:

nickjkl created this breakout board to free up some breadboard space:

I2C temperature sensor board

contains two I2C temperature sensors: a TC74 and a DS1631 because only one temperature sensor is never enough

KiCad design files and MSP430 Energia sketch example are available on GitHub:

nickjkl/I2CTempsensor

Jesse Mejia developed this project to control DJ lights and LEDs from any software or hardware that can transmit MIDI:

MIDI2DMX

Teensy driven DJ light and LED control via MIDI

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

jmej/MIDI2DMX

Here it is in action:

We’re offering our fast-turn super swift service for only an additional $5/sqin until New Year’s!

2 Layer Super Swift Service

Need 2-layer boards in a hurry? Our Super Swift Service has the same quality you know and love, with an even faster turn time of 5 business days.

Pricing

Happy Holidays! Until Jan 1st, we’re reducing the price of to $10 per square inch, which includes three copies of your design.

For example, a 2 square inch board would cost $20 and you’d get three copies of your board. This includes our Free Shipping option, although expedited shipping options are available.

Starting Jan 1st, the price will return to the normal rate of $89 + $5 per square inch.

Turn Times

Orders are sent to fabrication daily, and will ship within 5 business days days.

You can get a quote, approve a design, and pay for an order at OSH Park.

Super Swift Service is not available for Medium Run or Four Layer orders.

As a special bonus, orders placed before 11AM on Monday will ship by Friday of that week.

Note for international orders: In most cases, it will cost less and arrive faster if you order on the standard 2 layer service with expedited shipping.

2 Layer Specs

• 6 mil minimum trace width
• 6 mil minimum trace spacing
• 13 mil minimum drill
• 7 mil annular ring
• PCB thickness of 1.6mm (.063”)
• 1oz copper on both sides (1.4mil, 35um)

Combo board for the Raspberry Pi with IR receiver and transmitter along with Real-Time Clock and coin cell battery:

Raspberry Pi IR receiver + IR transmitter + RTC

I needed an IR receiver for my Raspberry Pi which I use as an internet TV receiver [..] Solution: make my own.

kentauta has shared the board on OSH Park:

Raspberry Pi IR receiver + IR transmitter + RTC

Sarunas designed this RC receiver replacement which uses a smart phone as remote controller via WiFi or Bluetooth:

Smart Racer

Why not control your RC car with smart phone?

Features include:

• Control RC car from Android phone or iPhone
• Control RC servo and ESC
• Control 5 Leds
• Drive RC car up to 70m away
• Drives Brushed and Brushless motors
• Works with 1:10 and 1:18 models
• Powered directly from ESC power
• Control using REST API
• Connection lost cut off

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

drme/ble-rc

Here’s the Smart Racer in action:

Machinekit is a platform for machine control applications. It is based on LinuxCNC and can drive mills, lathes, 3D printers, laser cutters and more.

Machinekit can run on an Altera SoC which combines a hard silicon ARM core with a FPGA. Charles Steinkuehler has been working with the DE0-Nano development board from Terasic. MachineKit runs on the ARM core with the FPGA configured as a MesaNet card:

DE0-Nano_Soc and the DB25 interface board

Charles designed a DB25 connected interface board, with pin-outs matching the P2 and P3 headers on a 5i25

cdsteinkuehler has shared the board on OSH Park:

DE0-Nano_DB25 V1.0

Mesanet DB25 daughter-card adapter for Terasic DE0-Nano development board

We were excited to see this tweet from Josh Talbot (@sparkineer):

Merry Christmas ornament! Thanks #oshpark. Design files at https://bitbucket.org/sparkineer/pcb-tree-ornament …
1:17 PM - 2 Dec 2016

The EAGLE design files are shared on BitBucket:

PCB Tree Ornament

The board has been shared on OSH Park:

Merry Christmas ornament

The first meeting of Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago is Tuesday, December 6th, with @Chris Gammell of The Amp Hour and Contextual Electronics. Our Drew Fustini will be there along with Andrew Sowa and many more:

First 3H Chicago Event!

Tuesday, Dec 6, 2016, 6:30 PM

Haymarket, 737 W Randolph St, Chicago, IL

This group is based upon the idea that you are interested in hanging out and discussing hardware. So we’re having our first meetup! Please bring a piece of hardware to show off or talk about. Are you interested in hardware, but you haven’t built anything yet? Show off software you have built! Or come prepared to talk about the projects you want to...

Check out this Meetup →

Jakub Polonský created this solution to make breadboard prototyping safer for components:

BFuse – Electronic Fuse for Breadboard

adjustable and programmable electronic fuse especially designed for breadboards – a breadboard fuse, or BFuse

The trip current can be set from 50 mA to 1 A but it can measure current up to 6 A [..] It has reverse polarity protection (by P-FET), transient voltage suppressors both on its input and output and two LEDs for indication

Set current and actual current can be compared using ATTiny’s built-in comparator or sampled by the ATTiny’s ADC. Then, the microprocessor controls a P-FET switch that opens or closes the power supply

@Max.Kcreated this Arduino Pro Mini compatible development board for low power applications:

LP Mini

ideal for data logging over extended periods of time [..] can run for months or even years on a coin cell

Hardware

• Microcontroller: Atmega328p with Arduino bootloader
• Real Time Clock: MCP79410
• Voltage Regulator: MCP1700
• FDN340P MOSFET

Features

• 2.8 µA current consumption in sleep mode
• Compatible to the Arduino Pro Mini (except for pin 2 and 10)
• A real time clock keeps the time and is used to wake the Atmega from sleep mode
• Sleep current is reduced by using a more efficient voltage regulator
• A simple Mosfet is used to turn external devices on and off if the IO pins cannot provide enough current

Hackaday reports that OnChip launched a Crowd Supply campaign:

mRISC-V: The First Open Source RISC-V Microcontroller

Now, this is finally changing. OnChip, a startup from a group of doctoral students at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Colombia, have been working on mRISC-V, an open 32-bit microcontroller based on the RISC-V instruction set [..]

Open-V Chip Specifications

• Package
  • QFN-32
  • No other packages are planned for the first run
• Processor
  • RISC-V ISA version 2.1
  • 1.2 V operation
• Memory
  • 8 KB SRAM
• Clock
  • 32 KHz – 160 MHz
  • Two PLLs, user-tunable with muxers and frequency dividers
  • includes all clocking and bias circuitry
• Analog Signals
  • Two 10-bit ADC channels, each running at up to 10 MS/s
  • Two 12-bit DAC channels
• Timers
  • One general-purpose 16-bit timer
  • One 16-bit watch dog timer (WDT)
• General Purpose Input/Ouput
  • 16 programmable GPIO pins
  • two external interrupts
• Interfaces
  • SDIO port (e.g., microSD)
  • Two SPI ports
  • I2C
  • UART
• Programming and Testing
  • Built-in debug module for use with gdb and JTAG
  • Programmable PRBS-31/15/7 generator and checker for interconnect testing
  • Compatible with the Arduino IDE

Open-V Dev Board Specifications

The dev board comes completely assembled.

• USB 2.0 controller
• 1.2 V and 3.3 V voltage regulators
• Clock reference
• Breadboard-compatible breakout header pins
• microSD receptacle
• Micro USB connector (power and data)
• JTAG connector
• 32 KB EEPROM
• 32-pin QFN Open-V microcontroller
• Dimensions: 55 mm x 30 mm (excluding USB receptacle)

Piotr Esden-Tempski of 1Bitsquared created this Open Source and Open Hardware debuggable ARM development platform:

1Bitsy

Firmware development with the lights on

Design files and source code are shared on GitHub:

1bitsy-hardware

Small breadboard friendly STM32 (eventually other mcu’s too) eval boards with exposed JTAG and SWD for the use with Black Magic Probe and others!

1bitsy-examples

Example projects for the 1BitSy development board

Please note that there will be no shipping this Thursday, November 24th, and Friday, November 25th, due to U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Please email support@oshpark.com with any questions.

Jakub Polonský of Kaktus Circuits created this programmable electronic load that sits on top of an Arduino:

The MightyWatt: a 70W Electronic Load Kit

Electronic loads are used to draw power from a source at either a constant current or a constant voltage. This comes in useful for things like battery discharge testing or making sure that PCB you designed can actually power those motors without releasing the all important magic smoke.

The kit is sold on Tindie:

MightyWatt turns your Arduino Uno R3, Arduino Zero (M0/M0 Pro) or Arduino Due into an electronic load capable of dissipating 70 Watts in a very small form factor. Ideal for testing power supplies, batteries, fuel cells or power amplifiers.

Design files and source are shared on GitHub:

kaktus85/MightyWatt

The Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH) is new annual conference for those building and using Open Source Hardware (OSHW) for scientific research:

The GOSH movement seeks to reduce barriers between diverse creators and users of scientific tools to support the pursuit and growth of knowledge.

GOSH 2016 took place at CERN last March with an excellent keynote by Javier Serrano

Open Hardware at CERN – a quick introduction

Video of talks at GOSH 2016:

• GOSH 2016 Day 1 part 1: Grand Challenges
• GOSH 2016 Day 1 part 2: Grand Challenges
• GOSH 2016 Day 2: Denisa Kera

You can apply to attend GOSH 2017, 22-25 March 2017 at the Innovation Centre at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile:

GOSH 2017 Application Form

@davedarko wrote in his LED displays on Arduinos – a collection project log on hackaday.io:

Arduino Pro Trinket – bubble display

With 4 of HP QDSP-6064 bubble displays in a drawer I felt ready to do something with them and the “Clocks for Social Good” – call on hackaday.com finally got me going

The design files are available on GitHub:

TrinketProShield_display

davedarko has shared the board on OSH Park:

ProTrinket Bubble Display shield

Carlos of GlowSaber wrote a great blog post on how we built an AVR programmer shield:

Building an ATmega328 uploader

As I learned more about Arduino, I realized that it is possible to redesign the GlowSaber around the ATmega328 chip [..] I designed an Arduino Shield that can be used to burn the bootloader and upload programs to an ATmega328 chip.

Here’s a example of an ATmega328 in a custom board:

cvadillo shared the board on OSH Park:

Arduino ISP Breakout shared project

@davedarko's mum gave him some small jam jars and it inspired him to design this clock:

FixieTube clock

30ml jam jars hopefully turned into beautiful LED displays – nixietube like looking without the higher voltage fuzz – fake LED nixietubes

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

davedarko/FixieTubes

Here’s a video of the clock in action:

Benjamin Shockley designed this adorable Atmel SAMD21 dev board in the shape of Lego mini-figures!

This circuit board was designed as a fun project for a SAMD21E microcontroller based development board. The circuit design follows the recommended design from the SAMD Datasheet.

The design files are shared on GitHub:

bwshockley/Minifigure-SAMD21E

bwshockley has shared the board on OSH Park:

Minifigure SAMD21 Board

From the Facelesstech blog:

SMD edge connectors

Normally you would use through hole then either have a 90 degree headers or just bend them over. [..] I had a brain wave, why don’t I lie the header down flat on the board and solder it to a SMD pad

The design files are available on GitHub:

smd_edge_connectors

Mike Rankin created this board with a tiny OLED display controlled by an ESP8266:

MicroUSB powered ESP8266 OLED Boar

I created this design as a challenge to make a design under 1″ x 1″ in size.

The hardware is an ESP-01 ESP8266 Wifi module, linear power supply, microUSB connector and a few oled display parts.

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

ESP8266_OLED

Here is a video of the assembly and operation:

miker has shared the board on OSH Park:

ESP8266 OLED Board Rev3

Hackaday reports:

OpenFixture Takes the Pain Out of Pogo Pins

[Elliot] wrote in with his OpenFixture model for OpenSCAD. It’s awesome because it takes a small problem, that nonetheless could consume an entire day, and solves it neatly. And that problem is making jigs to test assembled electrical products: a PCB test fixture.

In the PCB design software, you simply note down the locations of the test points and feed these into the OpenSCAD model. [Elliot] shows you exactly how to do it using KiCAD. There are a few more parameters of the model that you can tweak to match your particulars, but you should have a DXF outline for a test jig in short order. Cut that out, assemble, and test.