It's wildfire season, but Fedex managed to get our boards from Malaysia to us in good time, unfortunately there was a cock up in the ordering department and they shipped to the billing address, we'd left there about 15 minutes before they showed up with...
With motors in hand, I built up a quick prototype. The X27 motors are designed to only move a small pointer. They draw so little current (under 20ma at 5v) that they can be driven by PIC and AVR micro pins directly. Soldering wires to the thin pins of...
While the PCB's were being built, I turned my attention to the pointer issue. The switec motor's have a 1mm shaft. A good pointer has to be a press fit on the shaft, but not so tight that the mild steel motor shaft is bent while pressing the pointer...
Did a preliminary BOM today and selected a few key components, incl. the Spartan 6 variant I'd like to use and the SDRAM and Flash devices (may go with a BGA SP6 package with more IO...no risk yet to the design, regardless of what I choose). All...
Made a cosmetic change the schematic (top level) and also uploaded PDFs to Git. One small change to PCB was required to get the cost down (increased via hole dia for QFN LDO from 2mm to 2.54mm...makes "low cost" standard mfg avail)
Boards have been built and worked the first time. Woohoo! Only thing I've noticed so far is that I neglected to tent the vias (cover them in soldermask) under the super small BGA SRAM. This has a nasty effect of making it very hard...
Got the new boards back from Advanced Circuits (they rock BTW...attention to detail like few others) and they look awesome. Went with black soldermask this time around and it makes things look so much cooler (much more Hackaday-chic). These...
The first pass of this board was built with the Due in mind (3V3) and other development boards that I had sitting around, almost all of which *other* than Arduino were 3.3V. In planning the evolution of this however, it quickly made...
Whew! Last round of mods were huge because as you come to find out quickly, anytime you add a level translator to a board - much less two & much less 10 channels each - you end up having to reroute most of the PCB layout. And as though that wasn't enough,...
Your Hackaday Profile is the best way to express yourself. Fill it out completely so people can learn more about you.Basic profile infoWhen you first sign up to Hackaday.io, we ask you to enter some basic info about yourself such as: your username (which...
In this Hacklet, we take a quick look at the Sci-Fi Contest, play with high voltages, and fire the laser(s)!Sci-Fi Contest RoundupOur first Hackaday Projects contest has come to a close! We discussed many of the projects on the blog, the winners...
HackerspacesDid you know that Hackaday.io has a hackerspace index? That’s right, you can enter your local hackerspace’s info, pictures, videos, and social media links. Members and crew can link their hackaday.io profiles and drop comments about their...
In this weeks Hacklet we're looking at household hacks. Not necessarily globally connected home automation hacks, but task specific hacks that we want in our lives yesterday!We've all had it happen, you're burning the midnight oil on a project when you...
This week on The Hacklet we're featuring some of the best keyboard hacks from Hackaday.io!Hackers are really into their keyboards. Everyone has a favorite, and those favorites vary wildly. Mechanical, soft touch, ergonomic, QWERTY, DVORAK, chorded, you...
Amateur, or ham radio operators have always been hackers. For much of the early 1900′s, buying a radio was expensive or impossible. Hams would build their own rigs, learning electronics and radio theory along the way. Time moves on, but hams keep hacking....