Author Archives: Fernando Gomes

Is A Cheap Inverter Welder Worth It?

Posted on September 23, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

We’ve all seen cheap welders for sale from the usual online sources, small inverter stick welders for a very tempting price. But are they any good? When my local supermarket had one in its offers aisle, I took the plunge and placed it in my cart alongside the usual week’s …read more

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Posted in cheap welder, chinese welder, Hackaday Columns, stick welder, tool hacks, welder | Leave a comment

High-Speed PCB Design Hack Chat with Bil Herd

Posted on September 23, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

Join us on Wednesday, September 25 at noon Pacific for the High-Speed PCB Design Hack Chat with Bil Herd!

Printed circuits have become so commoditized that we seldom think much about design details. EDA software makes it easy to forget about the subtleties and nuances that make themselves painfully obvious

…read more

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Posted in autorouting, bil herd, design, digital, fr4, gigahertz, Hackaday Columns, high frequency, impedance. PCB, The Hack Chat, traces | Leave a comment

Punch Through Switches Gears, Shucks Beans

Posted on September 23, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

Do you own a LightBlue Bean or Bean+ from Punch Through? If you don’t have one now, you probably never will, as the company has recently announced they’re no longer selling or supporting the Bluetooth Low Energy microcontrollers. The company says that after selling more than 100,000 Bean devices, the …read more

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Posted in ble, discontinued, Lightblue, LightBlue Bean, microcontroller, Microcontrollers, news, Punch Through | Leave a comment

FIDO2: The Dream Of Password-Free Authentication On The WWW

Posted on September 23, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

Of all the things which are annoying about the modern World Wide Web, the need to create and remember countless passwords is on the top of most people’s lists. From dozens of passwords for everything from social media sites to shopping, company, and productivity-related platforms like Github, a large part …read more

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Posted in authentication, biometrics, ctap, Featured, fido2, Interest, news, online security, Original Art, password-free, passwords, security hacks, two-factor authentication, U2F | Leave a comment

Speeding Up Drawing To MCU-Connected Serial Displays

Posted on September 23, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

Writing image data to serially connected (SPI/I2C) displays from a microcontroller is easy enough these days, courtesy of standards defined by the MIPI Alliance, yet there are some gotchas in it which may catch someone using it unaware. [Larry Bank] wrote up a good summary of how one can get …read more

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Posted in lcds, MCU, Microcontrollers, mipi, serial displays, spi, video hacks | Leave a comment

Watch Legged Robot Run Circles Around Its Bigger Brethren

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

[Ben Katz] posted about bringing the Mini Cheetah (center, above) robot to the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held in Montréal, where it shared the floor with others for a workshop focusing on real-world deployment of legged robots. Those of you who haven’t been keeping up with …read more

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Posted in brushless motor, esc, legged robots, mini cheetah, robots hacks | Leave a comment

BeagleBone Deep Learning Video Demo

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

BeagleBoard often gets eclipsed by Raspberry Pi. Where the Pi focuses on ease-of-use, the BeagleBone generally has more power for hardcore applications. With machine learning AI all the rage now, BeagleBoard now has the BeagleBone AI, a board with specific features aimed at machine learning. A recent video (see below) …read more

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Posted in ai, arm, beagleboard, beaglebone, machine learning | Leave a comment

An Arduino Enhances This 7400 CPU

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

How quickly could you make an entire computer from 74 series logic, from scratch? [Richard Grafton had only 30 days until the UK’s Retro Computer Festival and set out to design and build his Cambridge-1 computer in that time. The result is a machine spread across several breadboards, with neatly …read more

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Posted in 4-bit, 74 logic, computer hacks, cpu | Leave a comment

A Hard Rocking Arduino Visualization Shield

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

Over the summer [ElectroSmash] put the finishing touches on the Arduino Audio Meter, a shield for the Arduino Uno that visualizes various aspects of an incoming audio signal on a set of four 8×8 LED dot matrices. Obsentisibly it’s for use on a guitar pedalboard, but thanks to the incredible …read more

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Posted in adc, Arduino Hacks, audio meter, guitar pedal, led matrix, MCP6002, musical hacks | Leave a comment

IoT Safe Keeps Latchkey Kids’ Phones on Lockdown

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

Phones are pretty great. Used as telephones, they can save us from bad situations and let us communicate while roaming freely, for the most part. Used as computers, they often become time-sucking black holes that can twist our sense of self and reality. Assuming they pick up when you call, …read more

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Posted in arduino, Arduino Hacks, Arduino Uno, lock box, Lockbox, phone addiction | Leave a comment