February 2024 Round Up
It's already the end of February - time flies when you're having fun - and this year is flying by!
Welcome to the February Round Up
We’ve got some great content for you this month - from ambitious attempts to create a home-made laptop all the way through to exploring latency in wireless-technology.
We've got projects that push the boundaries of what's possible with a self-balancing cube that defies gravity, through to humbler things like candle LEDs.
There’s something for everyone in this month’s newsletter. So put down that multimeter for an hour or so and dig into some interesting videos and articles.
Things To Watch
The Project That Broke Clem
Over at element14presents, Clem is on a mission: build a laptop from scratch. Turns out this is a lot more complicated than you might think, with multi-cell power systems, step-up converters and a screen… some projects are just too big.
KiCad Parts Made Easy
KiCad comes with a pretty comprehensive library, but you’ll often find it’s missing the part you need. LCSC has a massive parts catalog, with symbols, footprints and 3D-models - atomic14 has found a way to pull these straight into KiCad opening up a whole world of new components.
Did You Remember Valentine’s Day?
Did you forget to buy something on Valentine’s Day? Mellow_Labs left it way too late but managed to team up with MakeItForLess and make a budget-friendly Love Box alternative.
Kicad Automation
Are you tired of the tedious repetition in your Kicad schematics? Psychogenic Technologies has got a Python library that will transform how you interact with your schematics.
DIY Nickel PCB Coating
Dammit captain, I’m a Maker, not a Chemist! Donning his lab coat, atomic14 tries a bit of home science with some predictable results…
Debug with Light
How do you troubleshoot your hardware if you can’t connect probes and measure directly? Low Byte Productions has a solution, you’ve got some LEDs, use them to expose what’s going on in the firmware.
KiCad 8! It’s Out!
Yes! KiCad 8 has been released and PsychogenicTechnologies is here to tell us how to get the most out of it. A must watch for all you PCB makers out there.
Energy Harvesting is Hard
Energy harvesting is one of those things that sounds easy in theory, but is pretty hard in practice. Enwi continues his mission to make a low energy environment display.
Keep It Dry
How do you store your filament? Becky Stern has some tips for you - the biggest one is - keep your filament dry - and she’s got some handy tips on how to do that.
Things To Try
If you've ever wanted to design your own chip, Tiny Tapeout 6 is just around the corner - closing on April the 19th. New in TT06 is support for analog and mixed signal designs with an interesting ADC already submitted. For details on how to submit an analog design, check this link or watch the video below.
Upcoming Events
The 2024 Open Hardware Summit will be taking place May 3 & 4, 2024 at Concordia University and lespacemaker in Montreal, Canada
Things To Read
100 MHz Retro Upgrade
Back in my youth, a lot of home micros used the 6502 - a nice CPU that could run at an amazing 1-3MHz! With this project, you can get a pin compatible FPGA implementation that runs at a whopping 100MHz - that’s quite an upgrade!
Candle LEDs Upgraded
It looks like those flickering candle LED lights have had an upgrade. They’ve now got what looks like a PIC12F508/9 inside and have a whole new set of functionality.
Cracking the ESP32 AES
This is an amazing bit of work, by monitoring the power usage of an ESP32 they managed to retrieve the AES encryption keys.
Wireless Latency
If you’re doing IoT you have a huge range of options when it comes to wireless connectivity - but which one gives you the lowest latency? The article digs into the details.
Self Balancing Cube
Not sure what to say about this one - everything is in the title - it’s a cube that can balance itself on one corner. Pretty impressive.
IoT Insecurity
There’s a lot of insecure IoT devices out there - this article digs into one of them - you have to love the Batman mode he’s managed to get.
Is ArduinoJson Pointless?
We might need to change how we approach parsing JSON on our embedded devices. Turns out there are much better ways then ArduinoJson.
Closing Thoughts
The days here are starting to get a bit longer, and it feels like spring is just around the corner. It’s been an amazing month of projects and nerd news and I can’t help feeling that there’s even better to come.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read the newsletter - if you liked it then please share it with your friends.
Keep on making and tinkering - it’s an exciting world at the moment and there’s so much to explore.
This is an epic edition- thank you