Synchro Labs created this project to demonstrate the use of the Synchro mobile app platform with custom hardware:
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:
Star Simpson, creator of Circuit Classics, gave this excellent talk at Hackaday Supercon:
Over the last decade or so, the cost to produce a handful of custom PCBs has dropped through the floor. Now, you don’t have to use software tied to one fab house – all you have to do is drop an Eagle or KiCad file onto an order form and hit ‘submit’.
A very fun Internet of things project to control the custom RGB led over the internet from a web-browser or enjoy a nice sound reactive experience. Perfect for a smart home setup as you can easily connect this to any IoT platform or smart home software
Shortcuts:
Alan Yates of Valve talked at Hackaday Supercon about the research and development of the hardware in the HTC Vive virtual reality system:
[Alan Yates] is a hacker’s engineer. His job at Valve has been to help them figure out the hardware that makes virtual reality (VR) a real reality. And he invented a device that’s clever enough that it really should work, but difficult enough that it wasn’t straightforward how to make it work
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:
Slides from the his talk:
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:
Kris Winer of Pesky Products designed these easy-to-program, high-performance and low-power dev boards:
Program an STM32L4 Cortex M4F with the Arduino IDE via USB
Technical specifications of the Butterfly and Ladybug STM32L4 dev 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
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
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
Piotr Esden-Tempski and Gareth McMullin joined the embedded.fm podcast to talk about their Black Magic Probe and 1bitsy projects:
They discussed their current Kickstarter campaign:
Design files and source code for both projects is available on GitHub:
blacksphereIn application debugger for ARM Cortex microcontrollers.
1bitsyOpen Source JTAG enabled ARM development platform
You can also ask questions on Black Magic’s Gitter channel.
The KiCad Central on Hackaday.io has added this tip:
Say, you have a vector drawing in your favourite drawing software. You need that to become your board outline.
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:
The KiCad project recently announced a new stable release:
The 4.0.5 stable version contains critical bug fixes and version string improvements since the last release. The stable release version 4.0.5 is made from the stable 4.0 branch with bug fixes cherry picked from the development branch of KiCad.
KiCad binaries for Windows, OS X, and several GNU/Linux distributions can be found on the download page:
Please note that KiCad board files (.kicad_pcb) can be uploaded directly to our website:
Wondering who is involved in the development of KiCad? Project leader Wayne Stambaugh presented at FOSDEM last year about the past, present, and future of the KiCad project:
Wayne also presented at FOSDEM 2016 back in March, but the audio and video quality is worse than the 2015 video.
OSH Park 