One of the biggest trends in whatever market ‘Maker’ stuff belongs to is the Legofication of electronics. Building electronics is hard, if you haven’t noticed. Anything that turns transmission lines, current loops, and RF wizardry into something a five-year-old can use has obvious applications to education. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jeremy Gilbert] is building…
The next Hardware Happy Hour (3H) Chicago is Tuesday, June 13th, 6:30pm at St. Lou’s Assembly:
https://www.meetup.com/Hardware-Happy-Hour-3H-Chicago/events/240425517/
Here’s some photos from the previous meetups:
Learn how to design a simple add-on board for Raspberry Pi with KiCad in 20 minutes with this new tutorial from Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics:
This course shows how to make a custom but very simple piece of electronics for the Raspberry Pi platform. The primary purpose is to get users building something in KiCad as fast as possible.
The free course contains four videos:
ChrisGammell has shared the board on OSH Park:
This shared project has been created as an example of how to link to project resources:
Here’s the steps to share your OSH Park project:
Navigate to your Projects page and click the ‘Start sharing‘ link for the project that you wish to share:
The shared project content is formatted by Markdown syntax. This is a good guide: Markdown Cheatsheet
We recommend you include a link to your projects primary documentation such as Github, Hackaday.io, Hackster.io, or Tindie. Remember to publish your BOM as well, since your project cannot be built without it.
Here is what the shared project edit page looks like:
Navigate to the Shared Projects directory page and you should see your new shared project at the top. You can also search for shared projects from this page.
It is hard to get very far into electronics without knowing Ohm’s law. Named after [Georg Ohm] it describes current and voltage relationships in linear circuits. However, there are two laws that are even more basic that don’t get nearly the respect that Ohm’s law gets. Those are Kirchhoff’s laws. In simple terms, Kirchhoff’s laws…
The Open Panzer Sound Card is a work in progress with the goal of bringing inexpensive, high quality, and open source sound functionality to RC models but especially to tanks using the Tank Control Board (TCB).
The board is actually made up of two components. First, an off-the-shelf PJRC Teensy 3.2 is used as the onboard processor. The Teensy is then plugged into a socket on our custom carrier board that adds a Micro SD card slot (max 32 GB), an additional 16 MB of flash memory, an LM48310 2.6 watt audio amplifier, and headers for external connections.
Resources
Patrick Van Oosterwijck created this board to power the Raspberry Pi with a LiFePO4 battery:
Many IoT and other projects are based on the Raspberry Pi, but usually little thought is given to the power supply. Most project use generic cell phone adapters or USB power banks, which is fine for one-off projects where the duct taped parts and cabling don’t matter and it’s expected that SD cards will die because power was removed with the Pi running.
But when you need reliable non-stop operation for your prototypes, or you’re ready to turn your project into a good looking product, or you want to use different power sources such as solar, it’s time to look for a serious power manager for your Pi.
Built on the solid foundation of the #LiFePO4wered/Pi, this project provides Pi bootup and shutdown management based on button or touch, input voltage, battery voltage and time, all while making sure the Pi always performs a clean shutdown before power is removed.
From the BeagleBoard.org Foundation blog:
Watch the introduction videos from our Google Summer of Code 2017 students including BeagleWire software support by Patryk Mężydło
Checkout hackaday.io more information on the cape:
The BeagleWire is an FPGA(Lattice iCE40HX4k) development platform that has been designed for use with BeagleBone boards.
mwelling has shared the board on OSH Park:
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:
OSH Park 