Designing pcbs for assembly is easy, right? We just squirt all the footprints onto a board layout, connect all the traces, send out the gerbers and position files, and we’re done–right? Whoa, hold the phone, there, young rogue! Just like we can hack together some working source code with variables named after our best friends, we can also…
via Designing for Fab: a Heads-Up before Designing PCBs for Professional Assembly — Hackaday
Teensy creator Paul Stoffregen has shared a new project on OSH Park:
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.
Four of these boards where used in the Monolith Synth project:
The project is featured in this Tested video:
It used to be hot air soldering gear was exotic, but not anymore. There are plenty of relatively inexpensive choices. Many of these appear to be the same despite having different brand names and model numbers. One that is common and inexpensive is the 858D. These run about $50. [Gabse] has one and decided to…
Thanks to everyone that came to Bring-A-Hack last weekend after Maker Faire Bay Area! Here’s a gallery of photos:
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:
Jeremy g. designed a mashup between an Arduino Uno and a Xilinx 9536XL CPLD:
The XCACDV3, CPLDuino is a single board solution to meld Atmels ATmega 328 RISC microcontroller with a Xilinx XC9536XL1 CPLD. Allowing for rapid prototyping of digital circuits without the need for a breadboard. The CPLDuino is capable of passing information from the on board ATMega328 to the CPLD and vice versa, allowing for real-time data monitoring. Thanks to the on-board CP2102 USB to Serial UART, data can be viewed and manipulated via the virtual com port.
From Radomir Dopieralski on Hackaday.io:
A shield for Adafruit Feather boards with buttons and a LED matrix display, for simple games.
One common complaint we hear from most new KiCAD users relates to schematic and footprint libraries. The trick is to use just one schematic symbol and footprint library each with your project. This way any changes to the default schematic libraries will not affect your project and it will be easy to share your project with others without breaking…
via KiCAD Best Practices: Library Management — Hackaday
From debug messages to the fundamental ‘hello world’, serial communication does it all over three little wires. Now imagine being able to cut the cord to your next microcontroller project and use your phone as a VT100 terminal. This was the premise of [Ondřej Hruška]’s Wireless Terminal Project where he took an ESP8266 and added an in-browser terminal emulator which can be accessed…
via Wireless Terminal Over ESP8266 — Hackaday
[Frank Buss] designed an electronic version of a sticky note: a WiFi enabled, solar-powered ePaper, with magnets embedded in the casing. It’s based on the new ESP32, and the idea is that you can update it via your smart-phone or over the internet via a cloud app to show any message you want. Being an…
[Eric Schlaepfer] tends to turn up to Maker Faire with projects you simply don’t want to miss. This year is no different. Twelve months ago we delighted in seeing his 6502 processor built from an enormous reel of discrete MOSFETs. At the time it was freshly built and running random code to happily blink the…
via Dis-Integrated 6502 Running Programs; Acting Like Computer — Hackaday
OSH Park 