The Charliewatch by Trammell Hudson (@qrs) is in the new Hackspace Magazine:
HackSpace magazine — Issue 29
The Charliewatch by Trammell Hudson (@qrs) is in the new Hackspace Magazine:
Join artbyphysicistkitty tomorrow for the start of a weekly virtual class:
Introduction to Quantum Computing
I’m starting a virtual class on Hackaday’s Zoom channel every Sunday:
- 20:30 CET
- 14:30 US EDT
- 11:30 US PDT
We will discuss a new topic for 30 mins every week. The topic will be based on my comics of the week.

As I’ve been teaching our employees at Microsoft, I’ve built up a series of systematic materials from basic concepts to algorithms to hardware systems, and a tutorial on Q# (Q-sharp) – a domain-specific programming language used for expressing quantum algorithms. Typically we took a few months to go through all the basic concepts. Every class was followed by a few Q# exercises. But it is do-able for a 2-hour workshop, such as the one at Hackaday Supercon.
On November 15, 2019, I gave a workshop on a hands-on introduction to Quantum Computing at Supercon. Here are the slides for everyone. It might felt like a lot to people who encountered the concepts for the first time. But if they go back to the slides now, they’ll be able to recall and digest at their own pace. The workshop was also on high demand. We didn’t have enough space for more people. So anyone who missed it can take a look at the slides which hopefully can give them directions to study further.
Please feel free to post any questions and discussions in this project page. And any mistakes to correct in the slides. I’ll try to answer them here. Enjoy!
https://twitter.com/KittyArtPhysics/status/1242841934705590274
From Anool:
KiCad and FreeCAD virtual meetup tomorrow, Saturday, March 28th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=migkWNRE384
Free online class to learn PCB design is about to start:
You want to learn how to design a printed circuit board and we can teach you. Dr. Bob “The Wizard of Make” Martin (of Microchip) and Mark “Hard Way” Hughes (of Advanced Assembly & Royal Circuit Solutions) are spilling all of their hard-earned design secrets in a first-of-its kind course.
For many of us, the social distancing procedures being used to help control the spread of COVID-19 have been a challenge. We can’t go to our hackerspaces, major events have been postponed or canceled entirely, and even getting parts has become difficult due to the immense pressure currently being placed on retailers and delivery services.…
via Introducing The Hackaday Calendar Of Virtual Events — Hackaday
Great new episode of the Embedded.fm podcast:
Adam Wolf (@adamwwolf) of Wayne and Layne (www.wayneandlayne.com) spoke with us about making kits, museum exhibit engineering, working on KiCad, and extraterrestrial art philosophy.
Adam has a personal blog on www.feelslikeburning.com/blog/ as well as a website adamwolf.org. Adam co-wrote Make: Lego and Arduino Projects
If you want to know how to contribute to KiCad libraries, check out their instruction page: kicad-pcb.org/libraries/contribute/
We also mentioned:
Evil Mad Scientist’s Guide to Improving Open Source Hardware Visual Diffs
KiCad Automation Tools: tools to autogenerate KiCad artifacts when committing to git
Kivy: open source Python library for making displays
Cedux: application framework
OKGo Upside Down and Inside Out video and Art in Space project
Hey folks! This is a tough time for everyone, and we just wanted to provide an update on the health and safety of our employees, company, and production chain.
First and foremost, we’re making sure our employees are safe and tucked away at home. This is fortunately quite easy: Most of our staff works remotely to begin with. Our shipping crew is currently staying home, with pay, until such a time that we feel it’s safe to safe for everyone to commute again. Our current physical operations are currently being handled by Laen who basically lives at the office anyway. If anything does come up, us employees do have solid health care and plenty of allowance for leave.
As a company, don’t expect to halt operations, so you can expect your orders to be as prompt and purple as ever.
Lastly, we rely upon some contract fabrication facilities for the physical production. These fabs are critical for ventilator production, so it’s extremely unlikely they’ll be halting operations anytime soon. Our orders are obviously a lower priority than medical equipment, but should be produced on our normal schedule and help keep their machines up and lights on. Our fabs are doing their best to push for remote work when appropriate (such as handling orders, invoicing, and CAM operations), and minimizing staff on site.
– Dan Sheadel, OSH Park Support
Join us on Wednesday, March 25 at noon Pacific for the Side-Channel Attacks Hack Chat with Samy Kamkar!
In the world of computer security, the good news is that a lot of vendors are finally taking security seriously now, with the result that direct attacks are harder to pull off. The bad news is that in a lot of cases, they’re still leaving the side-door wide open. Side-channel attacks come in all sorts of flavors, but they all have something in common: they leak information about the state of a system through an unexpected vector. From monitoring the sounds that the keyboard makes as you type to watching the minute vibrations of a potato chip bag in response to a nearby conversation, side-channel attacks take advantage of these leaks to exfiltrate information.
Side-channel exploits can be the bread and butter of black hat hackers, but understanding them can be useful to those of us who are more interested in protecting systems, or perhaps to inform our reverse engineering efforts. Samy Kamkar knows quite a bit more than a thing or two about side-channel attacks, so much so that he gave a great talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference on just that topic. He’ll be dropping by the Hack Chat to “extend and enhance” that talk, and to answer your questions about side-channel exploits, and discuss the reverse engineering potential they offer. Join us and learn more about this fascinating world, where the complexity of systems leads to unintended consequences that could come back to bite you, or perhaps even help you.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 25 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about
via Side-Channel Attacks Hack Chat with Samy Kamkar — Hackaday

From the Hackaday newsletter:
Hello!
It’s a time of great stress and uncertainty. We are grateful for all of you who have contributed to the global effort so far. Let’s stick together so we stay healthy and hang out in the real life on the other side of all of this.With that in mind, we’ve started a calendar of events and classes. If you’d like to teach a class, host a show and tell, or help to organize our climate change summit, respond directly to this email and we’ll help you get set up.
Upcoming: Show and tell, dance party, DIY Strandbeest Q&A, Quantum computing classes. If you have something set up on your own channel you’d like us to add, let us know!
Many of you want to help: with 3D printers at home and manufacturing expertise, this community is in a position to help out those on the front lines.
There are so many Covid-related projects around the web it’s difficult to know where best to put your efforts. We’ve started a doc (right now, today!) that aims to list all the slack channels, Discords, Hackaday.io projects in the world to help you connect.
So many of the really important jobs are the ones that can’t be done remotely, we salute you medical staff, sanitation workers, delivery folks, and all the many others keeping our world running.
With love, ~Hackaday
OSHdata published 2020 report about the State of Open Source Hardware and we [Olimex] are extremely proud to be #1 OSHW contributor at OSHWA certification directory. There is another company from Plovdiv which is #7 – ANAVI Technology, congratulations Leon! You seems to be two positions ahead of Google LLC 🙂