Five Ways To Repair Broken PCB Traces

When everything used wires, it was easy to splice them or replace them. Not so much with PC boards, but everyone has their favorite method for repairing a broken trace. [Mr. SolderFix] has his five…

Watch SLS 3D Printed Parts Become Printed Circuits

[Ben Krasnow] of the Applied Science channel recently released a video demonstrating his process for getting copper-plated traces reliably embedded into sintered nylon powder (SLS) 3D printed parts…

2024 Business Card Challenge: PCB Business Cards For Everybody

PCB business cards for electronics engineers might be very much old news in our circles, but they are still cool, not seen too much in the wild, and frankly inaccessible to those in other industrie…

Restoring A Vintage CGA Card With Homebrew HASL

Right off the bat, we’ll stipulate that what [Adrian] is doing in the video below isn’t actual hot air solder leveling. But we thought the results of his card-edge connector restoration…

BikeBeamer Adds POV Display To Bicycle Wheels

Unless you’re living in a bicycle paradise like the Netherlands, most people will choose to add some sort of illumination to their bicycle to help drivers take note that there’s somethi…

M1 Development Board From Scraps

Apple is fairly notorious for building devices that are difficult to repair, but with the right tools it’s often not completely impossible to circumvent some of their barriers. As they say, e…

No Solder! Squeeze Your Parts To The PCB

What’s solder for, anyway? It’s just the stuff that sticks the parts to the PCB. If you’re rapid prototyping, possibly with expensive components, and want to be able to remove chips from the board …

Nearly-Destroyed Commodore Gets New Life

We all have our shiny, modern computers for interacting with the modern world, but at times they can seem a little monochromatic. Even the differences between something like macOS and Windows for t…

Reverse Engineering The Quansheng Hardware

In the world of cheap amateur radio transceivers, the Quansheng UV-K5 can’t be beaten for hackability. But pretty much every hack we’ve seen so far focuses on the firmware. What about t…

PCB Design Review: Tinysparrow, A Module For CAN Hacking Needs

I enjoy seeing modules that can make designing other devices easier, and when I did a call for design reviews, [enp6s0] has submitted one such board to us. It’s a module called TinySparrow (G…

Faux Silkscreen On A PCB Made With A Laser Cutter

If you’re getting PCBs professionally made, silkscreen usually comes free as part of the package. However, if you’re making your own, the job is on you. [Tony Goacher] makes his own PCB…

Proper Routing Makes For Many Happy Return Paths

Here’s a question for you: when your PCB has a ground plane layer, where do return signals flow? It seems like a trick question, but as [Kristof Mulier] explains, there’s more to return…

Fabbing A Fab New Watch Face

[STR-Alorman] is into vintage watches, particularly Omega Seamaster quartz numbers from the 1980s. Among his favorites is the Seamaster Calypso III, a precious few of which were created in a lovely…

Replacement PCB Replicates Early 80s Modem

It’s certainly been a few decades, but plenty of us remember a time before widespread access to broadband internet, when connections were generally made over phone lines using acoustic modems…