An Animated LED Fireplace Powered By The CH32V003

Once you’ve mastered the near-magical ability of turning your ideas into a piece of hardware you can hold in your hand, it’s only natural that you’ll want to spread the joy. The h…

Revive A Sony Vaio P-Series With KiCad’s Background Bitmaps

You might remember that KiCad 7 came out this February, with a multitude of wonderful features. One of them was particularly exciting to see, and the KiCad newsletter even had an animated GIF to pr…

Making A Solder Paste Stencil From What You Have On Hand

Sometimes there are moments when an engineer has to use whatever materials they have to hand in order to complete the job on time. Such a situation arose at the RevSpace hacker space in Den Haag, N…

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…

PCB Repair Is A Sticky Proposition

What do you do when a PCB is cracked or even broken in two? [MH987] has a plan: superglue the board back and then bridge the traces with solder, solder paste, or wire. The exact method, of course, …

An In-Depth Comparison Of Hobby PCB Manufacturers

[Icamtuf] has been working on a prototyping run of a project, which involves getting PCBs made by several low volume PCB manufacturing companies. After receiving the boards, he analyzed the results…

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…

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…

Bespoke Implants Are Real—if You Put In The Time

A subset of hackers have RFID implants, but there is a limited catalog. When [Miana] looked for a device that would open a secure door at her work, she did not find the implant she needed, even tho…

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…

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…

Different Etching Strokes For Different PCBs, Folks

[Sebastian] probably didn’t think he was wading into controversial waters when he posted on his experimental method for etching PCBs (in German). It’s not like etching with hydrochloric…

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…

Proper Decoupling Capacitors

If you’ve been building circuits for any length of time, you probably know you need decoupling capacitors to keep your circuits stable. But even though it’s a favorite technique of ours…

Hack Club Grants Encourage Open Source PCB Designs By Teens

[Hack Club] is a nonprofit network of coder and maker clubs for teenage high school students around the world. With an impressive reach boasting clubs in about 400 schools, they serve approximately…

Building Circuits Flexibly

You think of breadboards as being a flexible way to build things — one can easily add components and wires and also rip them up. But MIT researchers want to introduce an actual flexible bread…

Photoplotting PCBs With A 3D Printer

Do you ever wonder why your PCB maker uses Gerber files? It doesn’t have to do with baby food. Gerber was the company that introduced photoplotting. Early machines used a xenon bulb to projec…

Printing Antennas On Circuit Boards

Yagi-Uda antennas, or simply “Yagis”, are directional antennas that focus radio waves to increase gain, meaning that the radio waves can travel further in that direction for a given tra…

Silkscreen Busy? Put Labels Inside Pads

When making a PCB informative and self-documenting, there’s often just not enough space to silkscreen all the labels you want, and slowly but surely, you collect a set of tricks: using differ…