Too Much Over-optimization Is Never Enough!

A discussion came up on the Hackaday Discord PCB design channel about resistor networks, and it got me thinking about whether we (the hacker community) use them in designs or not. These handy devic…

Vectorscope KiCad Redrawing Project

When I saw this year’s Supercon Vectorscope badge, I decided that I had to build one for myself. Since I couldn’t attend in-person, I immediately got the PCBs and parts on order. Noting that the Gi…

Try It Out

It’s like Star Wars versus Star Trek at a SciFi convention, or asking creamy or chunky at the National Peanut Butter Appreciation Festival. (OK, we made that one up.) When Jenny reviewed the 1.0 ve…

Review: LibrePCB Hits Version 1.0

Nearly three years ago at the start of 2020 and before the pandemic hit, we took a look at an up-and-coming player in the world of PCB design. LibrePCB is by no means as old as the more established…

PCIe For Hackers: Our M.2 Card Is Done

We’ve started designing a PCIe card last week, an adapter from M.2 E-key to E-key, that adds an extra link to the E-key slot it carries – useful for fully utilizing a few rare but fancy…

Clever Test Rig Clarifies Capacitor Rules-of-Thumb

If you’ve done any amount of electronic design work, you’ll be familiar with the need for decoupling capacitors. Sometimes a chip’s datasheet will tell you exactly what kind of ca…

Designing Aesthetically-Pleasing PCBs

We’ve seen our share of custom PCBs here on Hackaday, but they aren’t always pretty. If you want to bring your PCB aesthetics up a notch, [Ian Dunn] has put together a guide for those w…

The Whole Thing In Python

[hsgw] built a macropad in Python, and that’s not a strange language to choose to program the firmware in these days. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The whole process — f…

Working With BGAs: Design And Layout

The Ball Grid Array, or BGA package is no longer the exclusive preserve of large, complex chips on computer motherboards: today even simple microcontrollers are available with those little solder b…

PCB Thermal Design Hack Gets Hot And Heavy

Thanks to the relatively recent rise of affordable board production services, many of the people reading Hackaday are just now learning the ropes of PCB design. For those still producing the FR4 eq…

Remoticon 2021 // Debra Ansell Connects PCB In Ways You Didn’t Expect

“LEDs improve everything.” Words to live by. Most everything that Debra Ansell of [GeekMomProjects] makes is bright, bold, and blinky. But if you’re looking for a simple string of…

The Benefits Of Critiquing Your Own PCB Designs

In a recent retrospective video, [Phil] from Phil’s Lab goes through a number of his early PCB designs, to critique and comment on what he likes and doesn’t like in these designs. Even …

Hackaday Links: October 17, 2021

We found a couple of headlines this week that seemed pretty alarming at first, mentioning as they did both “Chinese grannies” and “stun guns.” Digging a little deeper, it ap…

Hackaday Links: October 3, 2021

It’s one thing to speculate about what’s happening with the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, but it’s another to get an insider’s view on recent flight problems. As we previously …

Living The Dream: New PCB For A Dirt-Cheap Calculator Watch

Well, this hack has us tickled pink. We love the idea of buying some really cheap piece of technology and doing something amazing with it, and this is a textbook example of that. [davedarko] found …

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 …