ATtiny LED Letter Keychain Kit

 Jo Hinchliffe writes on the Tindie blog:

ATtiny LED Letter Keychain Kit

If you have tried your hand at soldering and want to progress to soldering with surface mount devices (SMD), this LED keychain kit might be just the ticket!

The kit is comprised of a tiny PCB featuring a grid of pads onto which you solder some of the 15 SMD LEDs supplied. You can use as many or as few as you need to make your chosen letter or icon. Arranged as 3 columns of 5 LED’s you can make any letter you require. The ATtiny micro controller can be supplied pre-flashed with the project code and once assembled the keychain has four display modes, all on, slow blink, fade and fast blink. Of course the code is provided in the documentation and you could always create your own patterns for the device.

You get a choice of LED colour when ordering and we think this is a great way to practice your SMD soldering or a nice kit to put together as a gift for someone.

ATtiny LED Letter Keychain Kit

Watch the 2021 Open Hardware Summit LIVE!

The 2021 Open Hardware Summit is streaming right now on YouTube:

Watch the 2021 Open Hardware Summit LIVE!

Open Hardware Summit is Friday, April 9th!

The 2021 Open Hardware Summit starts tomorrow, Friday, April 9th, at 10:00 EDT / 14:00 UTC

Tickets are still available starting at $20

Open Hardware Summit is Friday, April 9th!

Hackaday: Bring-A-Hack Is Back this Thursday!

As the pandemic edges further into its second year, the tedium of life under lockdown is taking its toll. We may be fighting the spread of infection by staying home and having our meetings over video conferencing software, but it’s hellishly boring! What we wouldn’t do for our hackerspaces to be open, and for the chance to hang out and chew the fat about our lockdown projects!

Here at Hackaday we can bring some needed relief in the form of the Hackaday Remote: Bring-A-Hack held via Zoom on Thursday, April 8th, at 1pm Pacific time. We know you’ve been working hard over the last year, and since you’ve been denied the chance to share those projects in person, we know you just can’t wait to sign up. Last year’s Remoticon showed us the value of community get-togethers online, with both the team soldering challenge rounds and the bring-a-hack being particular event highlights, so it’s time for a fresh dose to keep up our spirits.

It doesn’t matter how large or small your project is, if it interests you other readers will also want to see it. Be prepared to tell the world how you made it, what problems you solved, and a bit about yourself, and then step back, take a bow, and be showered with virtual roses from the adoring masses. There’s a sign-up link if you have a project to show off. Don’t hold back if you’re worried it’s not impressive enough, a certain Hackaday scribe has submitted an OpenSCAD library she’s working on.

Read more on Hackaday…

Hackaday: Bring-A-Hack Is Back this Thursday!

Lucky Resistor: Let’s Print a Cat/Pet Feeding Device

From the Lucky Resistor blog:

The seventh part of this series is all about the sensor board. It hosts the position sensor and four fill sensors. Speaking of sensors sounds complex, but these are just pairs of IR-LEDs and phototransistors. All design files for the board are in the GitHub repository and if you missed one of the previous parts, look at the overview page.

Read more…

Lucky Resistor: Let’s Print a Cat/Pet Feeding Device

Wires vs Words: PCB Routing in Python

Chris Lott writes on Hackaday:

Wires vs Words: PCB Routing in Python

Preferring to spend hours typing code instead of graphically pushing traces around in a PCB layout tool, [James Bowman] over at ExCamera Labs has developed CuFlow, a method for routing PCBs in Python. Whether or not you’re on-board with the concept, you have to admit the results look pretty good.

Key to this project is a concept [James] calls rivers — the Dazzler board shown above contains only eight of them. Connections get to their destination by taking one or more of these rivers which can be split, joined, and merged along the way as needed in a very Pythonic manner. River navigation is performed using Turtle graphics-like commands such as left(90) and the appropriately named shimmy(d)that aligns two displaced rivers. He also makes extensive use of pin / gate swapping to make the routing smoother, and there’s a nifty shuffler feature which arbitrarily reorders signals in a crossbar manner. Routing to complex packages, like the BGA shown, is made easier by embedding signal escapes for each part’s library definition.

Wires vs Words: PCB Routing in Python