UPDATE: Ponderances of what happened and where to go from here at the bottom------------------------Some things were necessary... the Power-Supply PCB was held down by only two of the four screws, and the two worst-placed ones. Nearly every screw in...
We're about ten days into our work now and I've spent most of them installing KiCad, figuring out our hardware needs, and getting my development environment up and running. Since we're now on cortex-m4 (last years KW01 was cortex-m0) we can still use...
Why do we solder anyway?Devils advocate (you)Lunatic (me)To hold things in place, duh, silly!We could glue them in place with a light glue that comes off easily.To make an electrical connection. Spring boardsbread boardswire wrapall the methods...
It works! After some bodge wires and double checking everything, it successfully boots into a working clone of the organelle! Its smaller and costs about $80 to make, and its all open source! It is only a first-pass at this, I do intend to make...
At the end of the front cover post I mentioned that we were working with a plastic sheet supplier to design an adhesive protector for the cover. I was pretty excited when I got the package today, but that excitement quickly turned into rage and frustration...
Thursday, 06/07/2023, 12:40.(I wrote this project log before copy-pasting it here) Anyway, back to DIY electric motors: I can't simply use two 10:1 reduction ratios (which would give 100:1 in total) simply because if I want to reach 30 rpm with...
The dumb badge requires a keyboard, and I'm doing this with a silicone keyboard like you'd find in a remote control or a ZX Spectrum. That's the easiest and cheapest way to put 100 buttons on something. But what is the layout going to look like? It's...
Before going on with the electronics, I'd like to write a bit about the most painful and stressful part of building a product: the enclosure. ---------- more ---------- It all started when we pitched the idea to a friend who's a product designer and...
Wednesday, 13/09/2023, 12:13 I'm feeling like whatever the hell I wrote in these "serious" project logs are complete nonsense, not only because I'm talking things with almost no basis in fact, but also because it looks like writings of a mad man....
In case you haven't heard, my secret plan for the "Anything Goes" part of the Hackaday Prize is to use the hardware I'm developing to instrument a Powered Paraglider. To the best of my knowledge this has never been done before! I've made a lot of progress,...
I am now waiting on the USPTO to write me back and tell me what I screwed up.But in all seriousness... it's a tremendous relief to be at this point.How big a relief?I started designing r1 about 13 months ago, and received the populated main-boards in...
So I have't updated in awhile. I haven't lost interest or anything (quite the opposite).Full story:My hackspace(where I'm building this) got evicted a couple months ago. Everything got thrown into turmoil. A little while later, I got a frantic text message,...
Where the hell did March go? Another really big month of work, though much of it has been focussed on the hardware side of things so the firmware update this month is a little lighter than normal (Though still a very worthwhile update). The v0.3.3 board...
Hardware wise this project is very simple, nothing more than a serial LCD being driven by an Arduino Pro Mini. As all I'm doing is collecting data from a serial stream and formatting it onto a LCD, this could be done with much much less. At first blush...
Generally speaking, there are three broad categories of power plants in service today.You got your coal power. This is the most common source of energy in the world, and also the most harmful. Statistically speaking, you are probably using coal power...