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2020 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat with Majenta Strongheart
Join us on Wednesday, May 27 at noon Pacific for the 2020 Hackaday Prize Hack Chat with Majenta Strongheart! It hardly seems possible, but the Hackaday Prize, the world’s greatest hardware design...
View ArticleBooks You Should Read: The Design of Everyday Things
With everything from APIs to Raspberry Pis making it even easier for us to create and share objects shaped by personal whim, it’s high time that Don Norman’s sage design advice falls on not just the...
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Keep it Simple, Smartly
“Keep it simple” sounds like such good advice, but what exactly is the “it”; what parts of a project should you try to keep simple? You can’t always make everything simple, can you? Are all kinds of...
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The Egg-laying Wool-Milk Pig
Last week, I wrote about two recent projects of mine that serve as cautionary tales in keeping projects simple — you probably can’t simplify everything, so it’s worth the time to find out which...
View ArticleMirror, Mirror, on Your Cam, Show Us What You’ve Drawn by Hand
Working and learning from home may be the new norm, and if IKEA shelves are any indication, folks are tricking out their home office with furniture, gadgets, and squishy chairs. While teleconferencing...
View ArticleCurrent Sensor Makes Intriguing Use of Concrete
Getting a product to market isn’t all about making sure that the product does what it’s supposed to. Granted, most of us will spend most of our time focusing on the functionality of our projects and...
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Get Over Your Fears
Some projects are just too complex, that’s for sure. But I’d be willing to bet that some things you think are too difficult actually aren’t, and it may be that all you need to get over your personal...
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Simple Tips For Better 3D-Printed Enclosures
3D printing can be great for making enclosures, and following some simple guidelines can help the whole process go much smoother. 3D Hubs has an article on designing printed enclosures that has clear...
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Diaphragm Air Engine
One of the tricky parts of engineering in the physical world is making machines work with the available resources and manufacturing technologies. [Tom Stanton] has designed and made a couple of...
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Label Your Shtuff!
Joshua Vasquez wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about how his open source machine benefits greatly from having part numbers integrated into all of the 3D printed parts. It lets people talk exactly...
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Death of the Serial Squid: When do you Give Up?
While searching for a connector recently, I revisited an old project of mine called the Serial Squid. This was to have been my first open-source hardware design. After completing the entire design,...
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Run the Math, or Try it Out?
I was reading Joshua Vasquez’s marvelous piece on the capstan equation this week. It’s a short, practical introduction to a single equation that, unless you’re doing something very strange, covers...
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The Right Tools for the Job
We’re knee-deep in new microcontrollers over here, from the new Raspberry Pi Pico to an engineering sample from Espressif that’s right now on our desk. (Spoiler alert, review coming out Monday.) And...
View ArticleFree to Good Home: FPGA Supercharged Audio/Video Synthesizer
Audio and video synthesizers have been around for decades, and are pretty much only limited by one’s willingness to spend money on them. That is, unless you can develop your own FPGA-supercharged...
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Balanced Design and How to Know When to Quit Optimizing
I got a relatively inexpensive 6040 CNC machine, and have been spending most weekends making the thing work, and then cutting stuff, learning the toolchain, and making subsequent improvements. Probably...
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Design an Electronic Catan Board in a Day
One of the things that makers sometimes skip over is the design of the project that they’re creating. Some of us don’t do any design at all, we just pants it. The design part of making something can...
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Retrotechtacular: Discovering Aerodynamics with the Chrysler Airflow
When you think about it, for most of human history we’ve been a pretty slow bunch. At any time before about 150 years ago, if you were moving faster than a horse can run, you were probably falling to...
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Beginning the Machine Shop Journey with a DIY CNC
Building a good quality machine shop may seem to present a chicken-and-egg problem, at least for anyone not willing to mortgage their home for the money needed to buy all of these tools new. Namely,...
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Keep Calm and Hack On: The Philosophy of Calm Technology
So much smart-tech is really kind of dumb. Gadgets intended to simplify our lives turn out to complicate them. It often takes too many “clicks” to accomplish simple tasks, and they end up demanding our...
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Isolated Oscilloscope Design Process Shows How It’s Done
[Bart Schroder] was busy designing high voltage variable speed motor drives and was lamenting the inability of a standard scope to visualise the waveforms around the switch transistors. This is due to...
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