From Hackaday editor Mike Szczys:

Seeing the Skill is Better than Seeing the Project

Pulling off a flashy project that gets the viral-media hug of widespread approval feels great. Getting there is no easy path to walk and often times the craft that went into a finished project doesn’t even take the back seat but gets no mention at all. Often I find I’m more impressed by — or a least my attention is more strongly captured by — the skills put on display as prominently as the finished build.

Case-in-point this week comes from the model railroad work of [Diorama111]. Seeing an OLED screen in the nose of an HO scale locomotive just like the real-life version is impressive, but how many people missed the one-off soldering masterpiece that went into this one? You’ll marvel at the SMD techniques used with through-hole protoboard on this one.

Occasionally we do get to look over the shoulder of the master as decades of skills are shared for the purpose of passing them on. So was the case back in May when we watched as [Leo] walked through his tips and tricks for prototyping at the electronics bench. This included a lot of non-obvious but clever stuff; tips on working with copper tape for solder buses, using Teflon tubing with bare wire instead of stripping PVC-insulated wire, and a deep dive into copper clad prototyping.

So remember all of us hardware geeks when you look to tell the story of your project. We want to know how it was done at least as much as what was done. There was a time when electronic designers were a separate work group from electronic technicians (and wow, those technicians were in a league of their own). These days we all have that technician hat hanging on our workbenches and I’m always interested in packing in yet another unlearnt skill. Throw us a bone!

Tom Fleet writes on Hackster about this awesome LED project:

The icosaLEDron Is an LED-Lit Regular Platonic Solid That Anyone Can Build!

Jason Coon shows us what goes inside his amazing icosaLEDron — a 20-sided, LED-faceted fidget toy that is freakin’ awesome!

Boiling this design down to the bare minimum, the icosaLEDron is a 20-sided shape, with 20 LEDs — one per face. That meets the functional definition for such a name, and drops the complexity by several orders of magnitude — not only in terms of assembly, but in functional operation as well!

The initial version of Coon’s icosaLEDron, which can be seen seen spinning above, kept things as simple as they needed to be. 20 triangular boards, each featuring a single WS2812B-Mini 3535 addressable RGB LED.

 

These 3535 packaged parts are a nice halfway-house for makers looking for a digital serial LED solution that can be placed in layouts where the conventional 5050 package would take up too much board real estate. For such situations, a 1515 or 2020 LED case might be a tad too tiny for those without stencil and reflow capabilities — the 3535 packages can still be hand soldered!

More often than not now, we are pleased to see the inclusion of 3D printing jigging and support tooling within a build. Seen below, the idea to use a simple assembly fixture is a well thought out one.

 

It might look simple, but even the small features — such as the rounded mountain pegs, mean that the jig can easily be removed after the soldering operation, without the need to flex the soldered connections too much.

 

Speaking of soldered connections, now’s a pretty good time to touch on the fact that all of these boards are identical. That’s more interesting than it initially seems, because it indicates how much effort Coon has put into the thinking behind the signal routing within this icosaLEDron.

Those little solder jumpers sat above each LED are able to control the direction in which the LED serial data stream exits out of the board, left or right — meaning that Coon can snake a way for data to pass through the sculpture, without the need for custom wiring, etc. Clever!

Read more…

https://twitter.com/jasoncoon_/status/1294704396065013762

It’s been just over a year since Valve released Index, their flagship VR system, and it’s worth looking back at this GitHub repository as a fine example of how to provide supporting materials to a hacker-friendly hardware design. The image above shows off one of the hacker-friendly design elements: an empty space behind the visor, with a USB port off to the right, that exists for no reason other than to make it easier to mount and plug in whatever one might come up with. There’s more to it than that, however. If one wishes to provide supporting materials for a hardware design, one could certainly do worse than emulate Valve’s example.

Want to Support Hacker-friendly Hardware Design? Follow Valve’s Example — Hackaday

We’re bringing back one of our most popular contests, the Hackaday Circuit Sculpture Challenge! Make your functional circuits go beyond utility by turning them into art! Solar-powered circuit sculpture by [Mohit Bhoite] which was featured last year.Wire and circuit boards are a fantastic media for creating beautiful projects, and for this one we want both…

We’re bringing back one of our most popular contests, the Hackaday Circuit Sculpture Challenge! Make your functional circuits go beyond utility by turning them into art!

Read more New Contest: Circuit Sculpture Challenge — Hackaday

bikerglen has a new project on their blog:

The Single USB RGB LED

This project is a single RGB LED that is controlled over USB using a command line interface from a serial terminal window. A PIC16F1459 microcontroller implements the USB communications device class (CDC), processes the commands received from the user, and controls a single APA106-F8 8mm round RGB LED.

The USB CDC causes the PIC to appear as a serial port to the host computer. At this point, any terminal emulator software can be opened to access the CLI, and send commands to control the color and brightness of the LED. The APA106 addressable LED protocol is identical to the Neopixel / WS2812b protocol.

The software, board, and enclosure design files for this project are located in my single-usb-rgb-led repository on Github.