Teardown, an awesome event for hacking, discovering, and sharing hardware, returns to Portland this June.
When?
Friday 21st June to Sunday 23rd June 2024
Where?
Beautiful Portland, Oregon at Lloyd Center Mall
What?
Talks, workshops, installations, demos and space to hack – check out last year’s line up
Who?
Anyone interested in hardware: engineers, designers, artists, educators or enthusiasts
Teardown is about the practice and the art of hardware: prototyping, manufacturing, hacking, testing, creating, disassembling, experimenting, and circumventing, all while having fun. Leave the marketing glitz and talk of venture capital at the door and come prepared learn, teach, and be inspired.
Subsidized tickets for low-income attendees are available. If you would like to attend and feel you qualify, please email [email protected] for more information.
Free tickets are available for a limited number of volunteers who work at least two 4-hour shifts. Please email [email protected] if you would like to volunteer, including any schedule constraints.
A limited number of free tickets are also available for members of hackerspaces or makerspaces who want to come and represent their communities. Please email [email protected] with details about your space.
A limited number of full-price tickets will be available for sale at the door. Payment must be via credit card: cash is not accepted.
Have an idea for a talk, workshop, demo, or installation? We’re looking for a broad range of topics, participants, skill levels, and formats. Submit your Teardown proposal! Accepted proposals get free ticket(s).
Travis Smith’s open source cartridge design for the Commodore 64 and 128 includes ROM loading, MIDI in and out, and Ethernet connectivity. Gareth Halfacree writes on Hackster:
At its simplest, the TeensyROM can work as a way to load cartridge ROM images into a real Commodore 64 or compatible, loaded from the Teensy’s own flash storage or from a microSD Card or USB storage device. It can also load program files directly, and at a considerably faster speed than official Commodore storage devices like the 1541 floppy drive or Datasette cassette tape deck.
That’s only part of the TeensyROM’s feature-set, though. The device can also serve as a MIDI input or output, allowing you to make use of the Commodore 64’s famous MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) chip from a USB MIDI keyboard — or to drive an external MIDI device from the Commodore 64 itself. It’s also possible to stream MIDI- or SID-format files from a modern PC and hear them played on the original hardware. Finally, the gadget also offers internet connectivity over an Ethernet port — emulating a Swiftlink cartridge with 38.4kbps modem attached.
The TeensyROM has been published to GitHub under the permissive MIT license with full source code, hardware design files, and a 3D-printable case, with Smith saying it was designed for those “medium skilled” at soldering; he is also selling fully-assembled units on his Tindie store for $59.
$20 per square inch, which includes three copies of your design.
For example, a 2 square inch board would cost $40 and you’d get three copies of your board. You can order as many copies as you want, as long as they’re in multiples of three.
Turn Times
Orders will ship within 5-6 business days of ordering.
You can get a quote, approve a design, and pay for an order at OSH Park.
Need more than 100 square inches of boards? Our 4 Layer Medium Run Service is a less expensive option for larger orders.
The Hackaday Supercon conference is an amazing convergence of electronics, makers, engineers, designers, educators, and anyone else interested in making cool projects. Each year we descend on the town of Old Pasadena to Hack on things over the weekend in early November. The amazing thing about the conference is that every year they build a complex electronics badge that every attendee gets and they do a presentation at the end where people can show off the cool things they made!
This year the badge emulates an old-school Vector Scope! It uses the Raspberry Pi Pico, an ADC and DAC chip, and a fancy circular screen to produce some mesmerizing green waveforms. Essentially it uses 2 DAC channels to generate arbitrary waveforms on the x and y axis, those outputs can then be looped back into the 2 ADC channels for x and y to plot on the screen! You can learn more on the Hackaday article below!
[..] I will be adding this design to my GitHub soon since I need to fix a few things before I release this design. So you may need to wait a while if you want to make your own. This project was done in a compressed timeline so it was more of a learning project and just something to do at Supercon that I hadn’t done before. It was amazing to get to talk to everyone there and the project helped me connect to others and became a fun icebreaker.
I am not an RF or hardware designer but this got me out of my shell and I am hoping to learn more in the future. If you have any suggestions or questions feel free to reach out especially if we met at supercon 2023 and want to chat more.
Our friends at Crowd Supply are hosting a Hacker Holiday Party at their Northeast Portland office this Friday evening, December 8th:
Friday Dec 8 2023 06:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Crowd Supply 55 NE Farragut St #2 Portland, OR 97211 United States of America
Crowd Supply is hosting a Hacker Holiday Party at our Northeast Portland office. Join us for an evening of festive drinks, delicious pizza and lots of seasonally-appropriate nerding out.
As well as drinks, snacks and pizza, we will have table space and power available if you have any projects you want to show off. We will also bring out our sticker swap box and community notice boards, so if you have stickers, postcards, flyers or similar please feel free to bring them along.
How to find us
We are on the top floor of the big red building on NE Farragut St. You’ll see our Crowd Supply sign on the street. Go up the ramp by the sign and straight ahead. Google will try to make you turn off NE Farragut St and go round the corner to the train tracks below. Google is a liar.
You can cycle all the way north on Williams to get to our office, or the closest Max stop is N Lombard TC. Alternatively, there is plenty of on street parking.
Art takes many forms. For some, seeing art on printed circuit boards (PCBs) has particular appeal, bridging the design and the geekiness of circuit boards.
While several folks have published methods of transferring their art to PCBs, some guides use software that is out of date or requires a high level of technical skill. This guide uses the latest versions of popular software, so hopefully it will get you started without too much of a learning curve!
Gingerbread – a web-based tool hosted on Winterbloom by Thea Flowers. Taking a specially formatted vector file SVG, Gingerbread parses the file into the footprint layers. The results can be pasted into the KiCad footprint editor to make the art into a PCB.
KiCad Version 7.x – KiCad 7 is the latest iteration of the venerable PCB design software. It came out in February, 2023, and so other tutorials using earlier versions are likely out of date as to the steps used to make art. For this tutorial, KiCad 7 is used to import art into a component footprint which is used to define the board files for the PCB manufacturer.
The ExADXL breakout board makes it simple to mount an ADXL module, or multiple ADXL, to a Raspberry Pi Pico. This is a popular approach to adding extra resonance measuring instruments to a Klipper-controlled 3D printer.
If the above is unfamiliar to you, Klipper is an open-source 3D printer firmware that is rapidly being adopted in the 3D printing community. It’s a very slick firmware with far too many options to dive into here but it’s well worth checking out and experimenting with. One aspect that enables some significant increases in printing speed and quality is that Klipper can measure resonances in your machine and tune the machine based on its readings. A popular route to enabling this is by adding a second MCU and an accelerometer. The MCU has to be reasonably capable and fast and as such the RP2040 powered Pico is a solid choice.
The ExADXL makes this really simple to set up with a mounting PCB for the Pico and numerous connectors for adding one or more ADXL modules, almost all possible options for which are available on the product page. You can start with just the bare board, or there are options for additional hardware. Optionally, you can have a complete unit with the Pico and the ADXL installed, flashed and tested.
If you’ve got a 3D printer that could use a breath of fresh air, then the Klipper firmware and the ExADXL breakout are definitely worth taking a look at!
In this project, I use a Python script and an updated version of my digital-to-synchro project to replay my mountain bike climbs and descents at 60x real time speed on a vintage aircraft altitude indicator. The updated D2S converter fits on a single board and uses three Microchip MCP4802 DACs and three TI OPA548 power operational amplifiers to produce high-power 400 Hz AC waveforms to power and control the servo loop in the altitude indicator.
Teardown 2023 begins today in Portland! It’s an awesome 3 day conference for hacking, discovering, and sharing hardware organized by Crowd Supply. Check out the schedule of talks, workshops, demos, and installations which will be updated in real time throughout the event. We hope to see you there!
Who?
Anyone interested in hardware: engineers, designers, artists, students, teachers…
What?
A three-day line up of talks, workshops, demos, and installations – see schedule
When?
Friday – Sunday, June 23 – 25, 2023
Where?
Beautiful Portland, Oregon on the campus of Portland State University
Why?
Shipping great hardware to you is rewarding, but we miss seeing you in person
How?
With lots of help from our friends, including our partner, CETI
OSH Park 