In the art world, it’s often wistfully said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the open-source hardware world, this flattery takes the shape of finding your open-source project mass produced in China and sold at outrageously low markups. Looking around on my lab, I’ve been the direct beneficiary of this success.

I see an AVR Transistor Tester that I picked up for a few bucks a long time ago. Lacking anything better, it’s my go-to device for measuring inductance and capacitor ESR. For $7, it is worth much more than I paid for it, due to some clever design work by a community of German hackers and the economics of mass production. They’re so cheap that we’ve seen people re-use them just for the displays and with a little modification, turned them into Tetris consoles. That’s too cool.

Microcontroller boards? My go-to is the “Blue-Pill” style STM32F103 breakouts, which cost nearly the same as the processor itself in small quantities. But these are clones of one of the first non-Atmel Arduino-compatible boards: The Maple Mini. Leaf Labs stopped making the boards, but with the designs out there and the price of the middle-aged microcontrollers dropping, it’s a huge win for hackers. I just bought a multi-protocol remote control for RC airplanes. I could have made one myself by sourcing parts and whipping up a PCB, but why? It’s cheaper to buy one pre-built, and I got a nice plastic case for free. My current 3D printers are a ripoff of the Prusa i3 design and a kit-built Prusa Mendel. The former cost less than a fourth as much as the latter, although the results are about the same. Why? Chinese mass manufacturing of open-source designs. I could go on for days.

It’s noteworthy that the folks who did the initial design work for all of this don’t get paid this way, and that bums me out. But of the aforementioned projects, only two were ever manufactured and sold by their originators. I’ve talked with Andrew Meyer of Maple Labs, and he said that he’s happy that they got cloned: the margins on the hardware were nothing compared with their design service income, and the benefit of having a bazillion Maples out there keeps their libmaple library well maintained by the community without requiring more of their resources. I know Joe Prusa isn’t a huge fan of “clone” competition, but he’s continuing to do what got him into the scene anyway — innovating — and that keeps their business running and expanding.

(The Mendel was actually a kit of Joe’s that he helped me assemble at a weekend workshop back in 2011 so I’ve paid him off directly anyway, and I just donated €5 to Pascal’s RC project too. My conscience is clear on these examples.)

Bigger businesses like Sparkfun and Adafruit can afford to be cloned because what they’re really selling is innovation, education, and documentation. Plus customer service and logistics and all the rest of the business of business. And for that, they earn a well-deserved markup. (See Nate Seidle’s great talk on the matter from 2016.) But doing all that “business” is a lot of work, and for a hacker with a few good ideas, getting the idea out there and getting it cloned is probably the easiest path to getting the goods into as many hands as possible, and making the project better.

Would the Transistor Tester ever have sold hundreds of thousands of units if left to the original hackers? I think not. And not every project is a mass-market project either. There are tons of interesting designs being sold in small quantities by the hackers who originated them, and I’m stoked to be able to buy them directly whenever possible. (Insert plug for Tindie, Hackaday’s sister company, here.)

But to those of you out there who have had the honor of being mass-cloned and ending up in my tool drawer, I salute you. And that’s the sincerest form of flattery coming from my hacker heart. I’ll buy you the beverage of your choice when we meet.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/18/the-sincerest-form-of-flattery/

In the art world, it’s often wistfully said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the open-source hardware world, this flattery takes the shape of finding your open-source project mass produced in China and sold at outrageously low markups. Looking around on my lab, I’ve been the direct beneficiary of this success.

I see an AVR Transistor Tester that I picked up for a few bucks a long time ago. Lacking anything better, it’s my go-to device for measuring inductance and capacitor ESR. For $7, it is worth much more than I paid for it, due to some clever design work by a community of German hackers and the economics of mass production. They’re so cheap that we’ve seen people re-use them just for the displays and with a little modification, turned them into Tetris consoles. That’s too cool.

Microcontroller boards? My go-to is the “Blue-Pill” style STM32F103 breakouts, which cost nearly the same as the processor itself in small quantities. But these are clones of one of the first non-Atmel Arduino-compatible boards: The Maple Mini. Leaf Labs stopped making the boards, but with the designs out there and the price of the middle-aged microcontrollers dropping, it’s a huge win for hackers. I just bought a multi-protocol remote control for RC airplanes. I could have made one myself by sourcing parts and whipping up a PCB, but why? It’s cheaper to buy one pre-built, and I got a nice plastic case for free. My current 3D printers are a ripoff of the Prusa i3 design and a kit-built Prusa Mendel. The former cost less than a fourth as much as the latter, although the results are about the same. Why? Chinese mass manufacturing of open-source designs. I could go on for days.

It’s noteworthy that the folks who did the initial design work for all of this don’t get paid this way, and that bums me out. But of the aforementioned projects, only two were ever manufactured and sold by their originators. I’ve talked with Andrew Meyer of Maple Labs, and he said that he’s happy that they got cloned: the margins on the hardware were nothing compared with their design service income, and the benefit of having a bazillion Maples out there keeps their libmaple library well maintained by the community without requiring more of their resources. I know Joe Prusa isn’t a huge fan of “clone” competition, but he’s continuing to do what got him into the scene anyway — innovating — and that keeps their business running and expanding.

(The Mendel was actually a kit of Joe’s that he helped me assemble at a weekend workshop back in 2011 so I’ve paid him off directly anyway, and I just donated €5 to Pascal’s RC project too. My conscience is clear on these examples.)

Bigger businesses like Sparkfun and Adafruit can afford to be cloned because what they’re really selling is innovation, education, and documentation. Plus customer service and logistics and all the rest of the business of business. And for that, they earn a well-deserved markup. (See Nate Seidle’s great talk on the matter from 2016.) But doing all that “business” is a lot of work, and for a hacker with a few good ideas, getting the idea out there and getting it cloned is probably the easiest path to getting the goods into as many hands as possible, and making the project better.

Would the Transistor Tester ever have sold hundreds of thousands of units if left to the original hackers? I think not. And not every project is a mass-market project either. There are tons of interesting designs being sold in small quantities by the hackers who originated them, and I’m stoked to be able to buy them directly whenever possible. (Insert plug for Tindie, Hackaday’s sister company, here.)

But to those of you out there who have had the honor of being mass-cloned and ending up in my tool drawer, I salute you. And that’s the sincerest form of flattery coming from my hacker heart. I’ll buy you the beverage of your choice when we meet.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/18/the-sincerest-form-of-flattery/

In the art world, it’s often wistfully said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the open-source hardware world, this flattery takes the shape of finding your open-source project mass produced in China and sold at outrageously low markups. Looking around on my lab, I’ve been the direct beneficiary of this success.

I see an AVR Transistor Tester that I picked up for a few bucks a long time ago. Lacking anything better, it’s my go-to device for measuring inductance and capacitor ESR. For $7, it is worth much more than I paid for it, due to some clever design work by a community of German hackers and the economics of mass production. They’re so cheap that we’ve seen people re-use them just for the displays and with a little modification, turned them into Tetris consoles. That’s too cool.

Microcontroller boards? My go-to is the “Blue-Pill” style STM32F103 breakouts, which cost nearly the same as the processor itself in small quantities. But these are clones of one of the first non-Atmel Arduino-compatible boards: The Maple Mini. Leaf Labs stopped making the boards, but with the designs out there and the price of the middle-aged microcontrollers dropping, it’s a huge win for hackers. I just bought a multi-protocol remote control for RC airplanes. I could have made one myself by sourcing parts and whipping up a PCB, but why? It’s cheaper to buy one pre-built, and I got a nice plastic case for free. My current 3D printers are a ripoff of the Prusa i3 design and a kit-built Prusa Mendel. The former cost less than a fourth as much as the latter, although the results are about the same. Why? Chinese mass manufacturing of open-source designs. I could go on for days.

It’s noteworthy that the folks who did the initial design work for all of this don’t get paid this way, and that bums me out. But of the aforementioned projects, only two were ever manufactured and sold by their originators. I’ve talked with Andrew Meyer of Maple Labs, and he said that he’s happy that they got cloned: the margins on the hardware were nothing compared with their design service income, and the benefit of having a bazillion Maples out there keeps their libmaple library well maintained by the community without requiring more of their resources. I know Joe Prusa isn’t a huge fan of “clone” competition, but he’s continuing to do what got him into the scene anyway — innovating — and that keeps their business running and expanding.

(The Mendel was actually a kit of Joe’s that he helped me assemble at a weekend workshop back in 2011 so I’ve paid him off directly anyway, and I just donated €5 to Pascal’s RC project too. My conscience is clear on these examples.)

Bigger businesses like Sparkfun and Adafruit can afford to be cloned because what they’re really selling is innovation, education, and documentation. Plus customer service and logistics and all the rest of the business of business. And for that, they earn a well-deserved markup. (See Nate Seidle’s great talk on the matter from 2016.) But doing all that “business” is a lot of work, and for a hacker with a few good ideas, getting the idea out there and getting it cloned is probably the easiest path to getting the goods into as many hands as possible, and making the project better.

Would the Transistor Tester ever have sold hundreds of thousands of units if left to the original hackers? I think not. And not every project is a mass-market project either. There are tons of interesting designs being sold in small quantities by the hackers who originated them, and I’m stoked to be able to buy them directly whenever possible. (Insert plug for Tindie, Hackaday’s sister company, here.)

But to those of you out there who have had the honor of being mass-cloned and ending up in my tool drawer, I salute you. And that’s the sincerest form of flattery coming from my hacker heart. I’ll buy you the beverage of your choice when we meet.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/18/the-sincerest-form-of-flattery/

Many a hacker spent their high school years picking up a few new skills in workshop classes. Whether it be woodworking, welding, or the patient, delicate skill of technical drawing, they’ve been a mainstay of secondary education for decades. However, composites are new enough that they aren’t a major feature of the curriculum. For those wishing to fill in a few gaps, [Easy Composites] have some great videos on carbon fibre techniques.

The video in question concerns the manufacture of a complex cross-section tube part, but these techniques can also apply to more complex hollow sections, like a bike frame, for example. Starting with a mold, the first step is to cut a rough template. This is then used to lay down the first layer of pre-preg carbon fibre material, and a more accurate template is made. The rest of the steps involve the production of a secure lap joint between subsequent layers, and how to properly use vacuum bag techniques on hollow parts.

It’s a useful primer on the basics of producing hollow carbon fibre parts with prepreg material. We’ve featured composites before, with this bulletproof armor a particularly good example. Video after the break.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/18/techniques-for-making-complex-carbon-fibre-tube-parts/

The low-cost LED has changed the way we approach lighting in all its forms, allowing complex addressable displays and all sorts of lighting goodness. But what did we do before we had cheap LED arrays? Use neon bulbs, perhaps? That’s exactly what [Manawyrm] has done with his chainable 8×8 neon matrix boards, taking 64 neon indicator bulbs and driving each from mains potential with an individual triac. A line of 74HC595s handle the data transfer, floating at mains voltage while their ESP32 driver is kept safe by a set of isolators.

A Twitter post shows it in action, but perhaps the most hackworthy praise should be reserved for his test rig. Unable to source a variable 230V mains supply for testing the array, he applied a 50 Hz sine wave to an audio power amplifier, and replaced the speaker with the low voltage side of a mains transformer. It’s the sort of hack we can’t help liking.

Neons have generally featured here as novelties rather than as significant displays in their own right. They’re interesting components that everyone should have a play with, not least because the possess negative resistance, and can be made to oscillate.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/18/forget-led-matrices-how-about-neon/

The Z80 is one of those old CPUs that is both obtainable and easy to work with — at least in some versions. [Doctor Volt] put together what may be the simplest possible setups to get a working Z80 system. He has the processor, of course. But everything else — clock, memory, and power — are from an Arduino Mega 2560. You could argue that’s two chips, but the board actually has several chips on it. On the other hand, you could probably pull off the same stunt with a bare ATMega 2560.

We’ve seen this done before, but usually with a few more support chips. If you are a purist, [Doctor Volt] also has some Z80 and CP/M experiments where the Arduino only acts as a disk drive for the computer and there are only two support chips. There are three videos for both projects that you can see below.

We were struck by how simple the first project was, though. Around 100 lines of source code is all it takes, and some of those are comments. The Arduino even provides the system memory (1K of it) and you initialize it by changing the memory.h file and reloading the Arduino.

The code does a bit of setup for interrupts and the clock and then just spins. The Arduino gets an interrupt on a CPU read and a different interrupt on a CPU write. All memory reads draw out of the simulated 1K RAM and memory writes go there, as well. The write code also can detect an I/O port write and sends that data to the Arduino serial port. It doesn’t appear to matter what I/O port you write to.

This reminded us of one of our favorite cheap Z80 projects. That board uses an ATMega32A in a similar way but also has external RAM. If you add a few EEPROMs to act as disk drives, it sits somewhere in the middle of the two computers from [Doctor Volt]. With so few parts, it is easy to get these 8-bit wonders in fairly small spaces.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/17/a-z80-board-with-very-few-parts/

You really should learn to read Morse code. But if you can’t — or even if you can, and just want a break — you can always get a computer to do it. For example, [jmharvey1] has a decoder that runs on a cheap Bluepill dev board.

The device uses a touchscreen and a few common components. The whole thing cost about $16. You can see it at work along with a description of the project in the video below.

The code uses the Arduino-style setup for the Blue pill — something we’ve talked about before. As for the decoding method, the software employs the Goertzel algorithm which is akin to a single frequency Fourier transform. That is, while a full transform gives you information about the frequency component of a signal across a wide range, the Goertzel algorithm probes the signal for one or a small number of distinct frequencies.

The decoder table looks confusing at first until you realize that each “decode” value consists of a 1 as a start bit followed by a 1 for a dash and a zero for a dot. All bits to the left of the start bit don’t count. So an “E” codes as 02 hex — a start bit followed by a single zero or dot. A “C” is 1A hex (1 + -.-.). Once you find the matching code, you apply the same index to another table to look up the actual letter or string of letters.

If you buy a Bluepill to make one of these, you might as well get two and build something to send code, too.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/17/bluepill-copies-code-so-you-dont-have-to/

Smart homes come with a lot of perks, not least among which is the ability to monitor the goings-on in your home, track them, and make trends. Each piece of monitoring equipment, such as sensors or cameras, is another set of wires that needs to be run and another “thing” that needs to be maintained on your system. There are sometimes clever ways of avoiding sensors, though, while still retaining the usefulness of having them.

In this build, [squix78] uses existing sensors for electricity metering that he already had in order to alert him when his oven is pre-heated. The sensor is a Shelly 3EM, and the way that it interfaces with his home automation is by realizing that his electric oven will stop delivering electricity to the heating elements once it has reached the desired temperature. He is able to monitor the sudden dramatic decrease in electricity demand at his house with the home controller, and use that decrease to alert him to the fact that his oven is ready without having to install something extra like a temperature sensor.

While this particular sensor may only be available in some parts of Europe, we presume the idea would hold out across many different sensors and even other devices. Even a small machine learning device should be able to tell what loads are coming on at what times, and then be programmed to perform functions based on that data.

source https://hackaday.com/2020/07/17/home-monitoring-without-all-the-sensors/