Hardware teardowns are awesome when guided by experts. One of our favorites over the years has been [Mike Harrison], who has conquered teardowns of some incredibly rare and exquisitely engineered gear, sharing the adventure on his YouTube channel: mikeselectricstuff. Now he’s putting on a workshop to walk through some of the techniques he uses when looking…
Kumar Abhishek just announced on his blog a project that he has been working on the past four months:
BeagleLogic Standalone is a specialized version of the BeagleBone which is intended to be used a logic analyzer based on BeagleLogic.
This logic analyzer has networking capabilities (10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet); it can be used to used to debug circuits remotely. And as it is a full-featured Linux computer, you can run the sigrok set of tools directly on the BeagleLogic Standalone board (they come preinstalled in the BeagleLogic system image), or on your host PC. It has 16 channels and can sample up to 1.5 seconds of data at the maximum sample rate, which is 100MSamples/sec (3 seconds of data if using only the first 8 channels).
I designed and 3D printed a snug fit “open” case for the BeagleLogic standalone board. I’ve written more about it in a Hackaday.io project log.
BeagleLogic Standalone is one of the 20 finalists in the Best Product round of the Hackaday Prize. The results are awaited on the 11th of November. It’s been a great journey taking BeagleLogic standalone from a concept to a prototype and giving a glimpse as to what it could be as a finished product and the experience I gained during the process is invaluable, and I wish to thank Hackaday for providing me with this opportunity.
If enough people sign up, I plan on organizing a group buy for BeagleLogic Standalone boards. If you want to get one, please do not hesitate and sign up here.
The documentation for the board is available at standalone.beaglelogic.net. You can also follow the project on Hackaday.io here.
Radomir Dopieralski has created handheld game console programmable with (Micro/Circuit)Python:
A small game console directly programmable in Python. I always wanted to make this, and after my work on #PewPew FeatherWing I finally decided that I’m ready.
The first version may be a bit of a stretch — I tried to make it as small as possible, fitting in the 5x5cm limit of PCB manufacturers, so that it will be cheap to make the PCBs. Using the cheap ST7735 TFT display, and a cheap ATSAMD21E chip. I also tried to put all the components on one side of the board, but failed with that — the power and reset switch had to go on the back, as well as the buzzer.
For one of [Nick]’s Hackaday Prize entries, he’s building a minimalist GPS clock. First up, the centerpiece of every clock, the display. There are eight seven-segment displays, two each for the hours, minutes, and seconds, and a smaller digit for tenths of a second. These displays are controlled by an ATXmega32E5, an upgrade on an earlier version of this project that only used an ATtiny and a MAX6951 LED driver.
via Hackaday Prize Entry: Global Positioning Clock — Hackaday
From Jeremy S. Cook on the Tindie blog:
Makernet Knob’s makes the point that “Rotary encoders are cool but hard to wire into your projects.” Having wired up a custom input device for my computer using an encoder, I can attest to both of these statements. In my case, it took me quite a bit of time simply to figure out how each encoder pin was used!
To help alleviate complicated wiring issues, this custom knob features a built-in I2C interface, which allows several (even hundereds) of knobs to be chained together without issue. Additionally, the top of the encoder can be depressed as a pushbutton, and it even has an RGB LED integrated inside of it to give you feedback right on the knob!
[visualkev]’s friend was putting on his own fireworks show by lighting each one in turn, then running away. It occurred to [visualkev] that his friend wasn’t really enjoying the show himself because he was ducking for cover instead of watching the fun. Plus, it was kind of dangerous. Accordingly, he applied his hacker skills to…
via Hackaday Prize Entry: Pyrotechnics Sequencer with Wireless Control
Jeremy S Cook writes on the Tindie blog:
Weirdly, one problem with memory now being so small is that these drives can be placed in areas that are difficult to access. Usually this means some sort of USB adapter (another amazing improvement over serial or parallel ports), but if you just want an actual SD extension cable in the form of a micro SD card, here it is! This device was conceived of when programming a BeagleBone Black, and could have lots of other applications.
micro SD extension cord designed by Tem Products:
I designed this little tool while compiling a software installation on BeagleBone Black. I needed to repetitively remove/inset the micro SD card. The BeagleBone was installed in a hard-to-reach area. So much time was wasted trying to inset the card with tweezers.
This simple tool plugs into the hard-to-reach socket, and provides a flexible extension.
Length: 3.5″
Sean Hodgins has a great tutorial on surface mount soldering:
Decide how you want to assemble your SMD Challenge Kit (re, the video) you can choose to use a soldering iron, or a reflow oven. They take about the same amount of time but using the soldering iron can be a little more challenging and doesn’t require a cheap toaster oven.
Parts:
Tools:
The Teensy platform is very popular with hackers — and rightly so. Teensys are available in 8-bit and 32-bit versions, the hardware has a bread-board friendly footprint, there are a ton of Teensy libraries available, and they can also run standard Arduino libraries. Want to blink a lot of LED’s? At very fast update rates?…
In the before-times, we could send text messages without looking at our phones. It was glorious, and something 90s Kids™ wish we could bring to our gigantic glowing rectangles stuck in our pocket. For his Hackaday Prize Entry, [Kyle] is bringing just a little bit of this sightless functionality back to the modern smartphone. He’s…
via Hackaday Prize Entry: Giving Phones Their Tactile Buttons Back — Hackaday
OSH Park 