Tom writes on Tea and Tech Time about badge hacking for Hackaday Supercon 2023:

Tayloe Mixer Frontend for the Supercon 2023 Vector Scope Badge

The Hackaday Supercon conference is an amazing convergence of electronics, makers, engineers, designers, educators, and anyone else interested in making cool projects. Each year we descend on the town of Old Pasadena to Hack on things over the weekend in early November. The amazing thing about the conference is that every year they build a complex electronics badge that every attendee gets and they do a presentation at the end where people can show off the cool things they made!

This year the badge emulates an old-school Vector Scope! It uses the Raspberry Pi Pico, an ADC and DAC chip, and a fancy circular screen to produce some mesmerizing green waveforms. Essentially it uses 2 DAC channels to generate arbitrary waveforms on the x and y axis, those outputs can then be looped back into the 2 ADC channels for x and y to plot on the screen! You can learn more on the Hackaday article below!

[..] I will be adding this design to my GitHub soon since I need to fix a few things before I release this design. So you may need to wait a while if you want to make your own. This project was done in a compressed timeline so it was more of a learning project and just something to do at Supercon that I hadn’t done before. It was amazing to get to talk to everyone there and the project helped me connect to others and became a fun icebreaker.

I am not an RF or hardware designer but this got me out of my shell and I am hoping to learn more in the future. If you have any suggestions or questions feel free to reach out especially if we met at supercon 2023 and want to chat more.

Read more…

Anne Barela has written a great Adafruit tutorial on how to make your designs into artistic printed circuit board art:

 Making PCB Jewelry & Art with Gingerbread and KiCad

Art takes many forms. For some, seeing art on printed circuit boards (PCBs) has particular appeal, bridging the design and the geekiness of circuit boards.

While several folks have published methods of transferring their art to PCBs, some guides use software that is out of date or requires a high level of technical skill. This guide uses the latest versions of popular software, so hopefully it will get you started without too much of a learning curve!

Gingerbread – a web-based tool hosted on Winterbloom by Thea Flowers. Taking a specially formatted vector file SVG, Gingerbread parses the file into the footprint layers. The results can be pasted into the KiCad footprint editor to make the art into a PCB. 

KiCad Version 7.x – KiCad 7 is the latest iteration of the venerable PCB design software. It came out in February, 2023, and so other tutorials using earlier versions are likely out of date as to the steps used to make art. For this tutorial, KiCad 7 is used to import art into a component footprint which is used to define the board files for the PCB manufacturer.

Jo Hinchliffe writes on the Tindie blog:

EzADXL: Add Pico and ADXL Resonance Measuring to Klipper

The ExADXL breakout board makes it simple to mount an ADXL module, or multiple ADXL, to a Raspberry Pi Pico. This is a popular approach to adding extra resonance measuring instruments to a Klipper-controlled 3D printer.

If the above is unfamiliar to you, Klipper is an open-source 3D printer firmware that is rapidly being adopted in the 3D printing community. It’s a very slick firmware with far too many options to dive into here but it’s well worth checking out and experimenting with. One aspect that enables some significant increases in printing speed and quality is that Klipper can measure resonances in your machine and tune the machine based on its readings. A popular route to enabling this is by adding a second MCU and an accelerometer. The MCU has to be reasonably capable and fast and as such the RP2040 powered Pico is a solid choice.

The ExADXL makes this really simple to set up with a mounting PCB for the Pico and numerous connectors for adding one or more ADXL modules, almost all possible options for which are available on the product page. You can start with just the bare board, or there are options for additional hardware. Optionally, you can have a complete unit with the Pico and the ADXL installed, flashed and tested.

If you’ve got a 3D printer that could use a breath of fresh air, then the Klipper firmware and the ExADXL breakout are definitely worth taking a look at!

Glen Akins (@bikerglen) writes about this clever vintage indicator project on the Photons, Electrons, and Dirt blog:

Relive Your Best Mountain Bike Descents on a Vintage Aircraft Altitude Indicator

In this project, I use a Python script and an updated version of my digital-to-synchro project to replay my mountain bike climbs and descents at 60x real time speed on a vintage aircraft altitude indicator. The updated D2S converter fits on a single board and uses three Microchip MCP4802 DACs and three TI OPA548 power operational amplifiers to produce high-power 400 Hz AC waveforms to power and control the servo loop in the altitude indicator.

Another round of ICE-V Wireless boards by Michael Welling of QWERTY Embedded is now being offered on GroupGets. The design combines the ICE40UP5K FPGA with a wireless interface driven by ESP32-C3.

Featured in Make: Magazine’s 2022 Guide to Boards!

ICE-V Wireless is an ICE40UP5K+ESP32-C3 development board, allowing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth control of the the FPGA by combining an Espressif ESP32C3HN4 SoC with a Lattice iCE40 FPGA. Additionally, several ESP32C3 GPIO pins are available for additional interfaces, such as serial, ADC, or I2C.

Features:

ESP32-C3-MINI
ICE40UP5K
PMOD x3
RGB
LiPo power / charger
USB-C
PSRAM

The 2023 Open Hardware Summit has kicked off this morning in NYC, for the first time in-person since 2018! You can watch live on YouTube:

The full schedule of talks is on the OHS website:

Glen Akins converted a WW2-era engine cowl flaps indicator into a USB peripheral using a microcontroller and four digital potentiometers:

“This project is reminiscent of my USB analog panel meters project but the drive circuitry is significantly less complex. This post starts with a look at the engine cowl indicator, it’s theory of operation, and some ideas to control it using modern electronics. The post then covers the design of the board, the software for the microcontroller, and a Visual Studio C# .NET Windows Forms app for controlling the indicators from a PC.”

“The completed and assembled board. The board features a USB 2.0 Type C connector, a PIC16F1459, four MCP41HV31 digital potentiometers, and a screw terminal strip to connect to power and the indicator.”

“The video above is a quick demonstration of the indicator in use. The indicator is connected to the USB controller board and the USB controller board is connected to my Surface. The .NET Forms app is running and superimposed over the video. As I slide the sliders in the app, the corresponding dial moves on the indicator.”