Designing A PCB GPS Antenna From Scratch

These days, when it comes to GPS devices the antenna is typically part of the package. But what better opportunity for [Pepijn] to learn how to make a GPS antenna from scratch for a badge add-on? A…

Chip Shortage Engineering: Misusing DIP Packages

After years of seeing people showing off and trading their badge Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) at Supercon, this year I finally decided to make one myself. Now for a first attempt, it would have been enoug…

Thin Keyboard Fits In Steam Deck Case

Although some of the first Android-powered smartphones had them and Blackberries were famous for them, physical keyboards on portable electronics like that quickly became a thing of the past. Presu…

Hackaday Prize 2023: Jumperless, The Jumperless Jumperboard

Jumperless is a jumperless breadboard with multicolored LED visualization of signals in real-time. Sounds like magic? This beautifully executed entry to the 2023 Hackaday Prize by [Kevin Santo Capp…

Where Did Your PCB Go Wrong? KiRI Knows

When working on a PCB design in KiCad, it’s helpful that the files are all text and can easily be checked into Git or other source control. However, stepping back through the revisions to det…

Hackaday Prize 2023: Circuit Scout Lends A Hand (Or Two) For Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting a circuit is easy, right? All you need is a couple of hands to hold the probes, another hand to twiddle the knobs, a pair of eyes to look at the schematic, another pair to look at t…

Easyeda2KiCad: Never Draw A Footprint Again

What if I told you that you might never need to draw a new footprint again? Such is my friend’s impression of the tool that she’s shown me and I’m about to show you in turn, havin…

Nail, Meet KiCad

You know the old saying. When all you have open is KiCad, everything looks like a PCB. That was certainly true for [Evan], who needed to replace a 2.5D small part recently and turned to PCBs to get…

Importing EAGLE Projects Into KiCad 7, And How To Fix Them

Migrating a PCB design from one CAD software package to another is no one’s favorite task. It almost never works cleanly. Often there are missing schematic symbols, scrambled PCB footprints, …

Hackaday Links: April 16, 2023

The dystopian future you’ve been expecting is here now, at least if you live in New York City, which unveiled a trio of technology solutions to the city’s crime woes this week. Surprisi…

Kicad Autorouting Made Easy

One of the most laborious tasks in PCB layout is the routing. Autorouting isn’t always perfect, but it is nice to have the option, even if you only use it to get started and then hand-tune th…

Physics-Controlled Component Auto-Placer

[Jarrett] recently stumbled upon a class of drawing algorithms called force-directed graphs, which artificially apply forces to the elements. The final graph is then generated by applying the laws …

KiCad 7.0.0 Is Here, Brings Trove Of Improvements

Yesterday, the KiCad team has released KiCad 7.0.0 – a surprise for those of us who have only gotten used to the wonders of KiCad 6, and it’s undoubtedly a welcome one! Some of these fe…

Create Your RTL Simulations With KiCAD

[Bob Alexander] is in the process of designing a homebrew discrete TTL CPU, and wanted a way to enter schematics for digital simulations via a Verilog RTL flow. Since KiCAD is pretty good at handli…

Building A Fake Printer To Grab Screenshots Off The Parallel Port

[Tom Verbeure] recently found himself lamenting the need to take screen grabs from an Advantest R3273 spectrum analyzer with a phone camera, as the older gear requires you to either grab tables of …

KiCanvas Helps Teach And Share KiCad Projects In Browsers

KiCad is undeniably the hacker favourite when it comes to PCB design, and we’ve built a large amount of infrastructure around it – plugins, integrations, exporters, viewers, and much mo…

KiCad 2022 End-of-Year Recap And 7.0 Preview

[Chris Gammell] moderated the KiCad 2022 End-of-Year Recap with several KiCad developers and librarians. They reviewed what’s been bubbling up in the nightly KiCad 6 builds, what we can expec…

Alpakka: A Creative Commons Game Controller

Input Labs’ mission is to produce open-source hardware and software for creating gaming controllers that can be adapted to anyone. Alpakka is their current take on a generic controller, looki…

MikroLeo, A 4-Bit Retro Learning Platform

MikroLeo is a discrete TTL logic-based microcomputer intended for educational purposes created by [Edson Junior Acordi], an Electronics Professor at the Brazilian Federal Institute of Paraná, Brazi…

Git Your PCBs Online

Last time, I’ve shown you how to create a local Git repository around your PCB project. That alone provides you with local backups, helping you never lose the changes you make to your files, …