Finding out you’ve got a flat tyres halfway into a long ride is a frustrating experience for a cyclist. Maintaining the correct tyre pressures is key to a good ride, whether you’re stacking up the miles on the road or tackling tricky single track in the mountains. [CaptMcAllister] has put together a device that makes keeping an eye on your tyres easy.

The device consists of an ultra low power microcontroller from Texas Instruments, paired with a pressure sensor. Set up for Near Field Communication, or NFC, it’s designed to be powered by the smartphone that queries the microcontroller for a reading. We featured a prototype back in 2015 which required mounting the device within the inner tube of the tyre itself. However, this required invasive installation and the devices tended to wear out over time due to flex damaging the delicate copper coil antenna.

Read more on Hackaday…

I recently posted about the open source BioAmp kit by Upside Down Labs on Tindie and a new version is now available with a proper printed circuit board (in purple, of course):

BioAmp v1.5 kit

A single chip biopotential amplifier for recording any biopotential signal non-invasively.

What is BioAmp v1.5?

BioAmp v1.5 is a single chip biopotential amplifier. It can record any biopotential signal non-invasively and doesn’t require any microcontroller to sample the signal. You just plug 9v Battery to board, Electrodes to body and Audio jack to Mobile/Laptop and you are ready to record signals like EMG, ECG, EKG, EOG, and EEG. You can record the signals on a pc using audacity OR on mobile using Backyard brain’s spike recorder app.

Why did I made this BioAmp v1.5?

I made this Board as a cheap alternative to the Backyard brain’s spiker box and human interface kit. You can perform everything that the spiker box does, although some projects may require a bit of tinkering (ex. opamp circuit on a breadboard), and that’s what makes it more fun because you’ll learn a lot about biological signals and electronics.

Nice design by @Izzy_the_Isz:

Electronic Cirtuit Board Menorah for Hannukah

Celebrate The Festival of Lights with this home-designed hand built circuit board Menorah controlled by an Arduino. Limited Run for Hannukah 2020.

Each circuit comes fully assembled and is tested to display a user-adjustable number of lights, and to add a light each time the board is turned on.

Tune in tonight at 8:00 MST to watch me build up my Electronic Hannukiot https://t.co/bszPNwiTUQ pic.twitter.com/bkSHSzD14V

— @[email protected] (@Izzy_the_Isz) December 6, 2020

The Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS) is building ultra-low-cost, open source rockets and satellites that feature some of the most sophisticated amateur rocket avionics systems. Nearly all of the PSAS rocket designs, schematics, and code they develop are published on GitHub.

PSAS is currently working on the exciting open source OreSat cubesat project to give Oregon educators free access to satellite imagery:

Here's an exploded view of OreSat0, showing the internal cards, frames, solar panels, and turnstile antenna.
We are T-7 months from the launch of OreSat0! We need your help to get to space!#engineering #business #aerospace #donationmatch #psascrowdfunding pic.twitter.com/GQxAcGKKMh

— Oregon's CubeSat (@oregoncubesat) December 7, 2020

They are currently crowdfunding, and the first $10,000 will be matched! Donations can be made on PSAS website.

The BioAmp v1 designed by Deepak Khatri is a bio-potential amplifier for tinkers & hackers alike, who want to build projects that incorporate signals from the human body:

BioAmp v1 kit

BioAmp v1 is an open hardware board that can amplify biological signals and it can be used for sampling bio-potential differences. This board can be used for signals like EEG, ECG, EKG and EMG. You can use the included recorder cable for recording the signal on a pc using audacity OR on mobile using Backyard brain’s spike recorder app. The other cable with male headers, which I will call the Tinker cable, you can use it for connecting the board’s output to a breadboard for amplification and filtering, OR you can connect it directly to Arduino.

Coming soon as a purple PCB…

https://twitter.com/lorforlinux/status/1335968206905733120

Another update from the Intelligent Toasters blog:

Retro CPC Dongle – Part 48

The CPC2 daughter board described in my last post arrived quicker than expected, but dry assembling the board revealed some unforeseen problems. So this post contains another lesson learned.

Before I desoldered the headers on the bottom of the CPC2, I thought I’d check the alignment of the pin headers on the daughter board against the mating pads on the bottom of the CPC2. One of my spare CPC2 boards aligned perfectly, but revealed an issue that I hadn’t considered.

Fortunately, the daughter board was only a two layer board and so fairly inexpensive. So while I won’t be using it for now, it’s another lesson learned. It was also good to prove that Kicad is both easy to use and natively works with the file upload at OshPark.

On a final note, compare the OSH Park PCBs with the KiCad render. Spooky how similar they are, right?

Dave Neary will be joined by Limor Fried of Adafruit, Alicia Gibb of the Open Source Hardware Association, and Jason Kridner, co-founder of the BeagleBoard.org project. They will discuss the role that open source software development has played in enabling an open hardware community to develop, and the role that open source software plays in the economics of open hardware companies.

Open source experts @pipix, @Jadon & @adafruit Limor Fried will lead a discussion about Open Source Hardware on Dec 8. Register now at: https://t.co/8NpquPti4D pic.twitter.com/UTH5J9uuC2

— Open Source in Business (@ossinbusiness) December 2, 2020

Circuit Sculpture was one of our most anticipated workshops of Hackaday Remoticon 2020, and now it’s ready for those who missed it to enjoy. A beginning circuit sculptor could hardly ask for more than this workshop, which highlights three different approaches to building firefly circuit sculptures and is led by some of the most prominent people to ever bend brass and components to their will — Jiří Praus, Mohit Bhoite and Kelly Heaton.

Remoticon Video: Circuit Sculpture Workshop — Hackaday

New blog post from Jason Lopez of AtomSoft:

DipDuino-SAMD21

Hey everyone. Ive been busy working a new job and been kind of sick lately. So i havent had much time to do any physical work but i do have a new board. Its based on my DipDuino but using the SAMD21 instead. This is a beautiful little PCB with tons of power in a nice small form factor.

The MCU of choice here is the ATSAMD21G18 which is a 32-Bit ARM Cortex M0+. The PCB operates on 3.3v and can be powered and programmed via USB Cable. You can also power with USB pin on the header but please dont do both at the same time as there is no real protection for your USB port.

The SAMD21G18 runs at 48MHz and has 256KB of FLASH and 32KB of SRAM. Its a great part. The Arduino Zero uses the same MCU and this means that i will also preprogram this to run as an Arduino Zero for out of the box programming. No need for a debugger.

Here is a render. The PCB is 71.63mm x 12.06mm [2.82in x 0.47in] … No actual PCB made or tested but maybe soon.

DipDuino-SAMD21 https://t.co/vGOLH5oYf8

— Jason Lopez (@AtomSoft) December 3, 2020

Great talk by Javier Serrano of CERN yesterday about open hardware licensing:

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, updated the CERN Open Hardware Licence (https://cern.ch/cernohl) this year. This new version maintains the original goal of providing a sound legal basis for the sharing of hardware designs, while bringing in numerous improvements.

Javier is one the authors of the licence. He will introduce licensing, open-source and the challenges related to licensing of open-source hardware designs, along with the solutions provided by version 2 of the CERN OHL.