Bringing The 555 Mini-Notebook To Video

Like many of us [AnotherMaker] is a fan of the classic Forrest Mims electronics books, specifically, the Engineer’s Mini-Notebook series. They were great sources of inspiration, but at the ti…

PCB Design Review: HAB Tracker With ATMega328P

Welcome to the Design Review Central! [VE3SVF] sends us their board, and it’s a HAB (High Altitude Balloon) tracker board. It’s got the venerable ATMega28P on it, a LoRa modem and a GPS…

The Best DIY PCB Method?

Now before you start asking yourself “best for what purpose?”, just have a look at the quality of the DIY PCB in the image above. [ForOurGood] is getting higher resolution on the silkscreen than we…

2024 Business Card Challenge: Integrated Game Card

[Dan Schnur] has a simple strategy to ensure their business card stays on the client’s desk and doesn’t just get lobbed in a drawer: make it into a simple gaming platform. This entry in…

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…

2024 Business Card Challenge: BAUDI/O For The Audio Hacker

[Simon B] enters our 2024 Business Card Challenge with BAUDI/O, a genuinely useful audio output device. The device is based around the PCM2706 DAC, which handles all the USB interfacing and audio s…

2024 Business Card Challenge: T-800’s 555 Brain

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day it’s revealed that Skynet becomes self-aware in August of 1997, and promptly launches a nuclear attack against Russia to draw humanity into a war which ultimatel…

Turbocase Generates A PCB Shell For You

Our PCBs greatly benefit from cases – what’s with all the pins that can be accidentally shorted, connectors that stick out of the outline, and cables pulling the board into different di…

How To Cram 945 LEDs Into A Teeny Tiny Vegas-Style Sphere

[Carl Bugeja] finds the engineering behind the Las Vegas Sphere fascinating, and made a video all about the experience of designing and building a micro-sized desktop version. [Carl]’s versio…

Design Review: USB-C PD Input For Yaesu FRG7700

Today is another board from a friend, [treble], who wants to convert a Yaesu FRG7700 radio to USB-C PD power. It’s yet another review that I’ve done privately, and then realized I&#8217…

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 …

Giving Your KiCad PCB Repository Pretty Pictures

Publishing your boards on GitHub or GitLab is a must, and leads to wonderful outcomes in the hacker world. On their own, however, your board files might have the repo look a bit barren; having a pi…

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…

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…

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…

Share Your Projects: KiCad Automations And Pretty Renders

I have a pretty large GitHub repository, with all of my boards open-sourced there. Now, I’m finally facing the major problem it has – it can be uncomfortable for others to work with. I …

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…

ProPico For Your Pro Pico Needs

Ever feel like the Pi Pico board could be doing way more given its footprint? Does it bother you that the RP2040’s ADC quality is even further decreased because of the noisy onboard switching…

From KiCad To Blender For A Stunning Render

We love Blender. It brings you 3D modeling, but not in a CAD way — instead, people commonly use it to create animations, movies, games, and even things like VR models. In short, Blender is ab…