Here’s one way to really keep the component count low. [David] developed an NES controller that doesn’t use any buttons. The copper clad has been milled to provide a pad which registers a button push based on capacitance. The board has a SIL header at the top, making it easy to plug into the Arduino [...]

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[Chris] has been hard at work building his own version of Simon called [Nomis]. Although [HAD] has featured an ATiny Simon clone before, the article does an excellent job explaining how the system works. The ATTiny85 is used to control this game, which, for now is laid out on a simple breadboard. A PCB version [...]

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This one almost got relegated to a links post, but [Ken's] simple PCB vise (PDF) is just so useful we had to give it a standalone feature. It works so well because he made every design feature count. For instance, the groove the holds the PCB (almost impossible to see here but look at the [...]

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When [Adr1an] wrote in to share a link to his PCB etching tutorial he mentioned that he knew we had already covered a ton of these guides. He’s absolutely right, not only have we featured a great number of them, but we also wrote our own quite a while ago. But that doesn’t mean we [...]

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[Koogar] came up with a useful tool for checking the measurements of your layouts in Eagle CAD. He calls it the Gridrunner; a custom part that adds a 200mm ruler to your design. Tick marks are in 1/10th of a millimeter increments for great accuracy when used with the zoom feature of Eagle. Once you’ve [...]

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[Karl] wrote in to tell us about a software package called EagleUp that will import your Eagle CAD PCB designs into Google SketchUp. It bridges the gap between the two using the open source image processing software ImageMagick. As you can see above, you’ll end up with a beautifully rendered 3D model of your hardware. [...]

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Version 6 of the popular schematic and PCB layout software EAGLE is now in beta testing. The most notable change is the migration to XML file formats that we looked at last month. [PT] didn’t waste any time getting his hands on the software and giving it a thorough test drive. The image seen above [...]

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[Kaushlesh Chandel] prototyped a few projects on his Arduino that use an HD44780 Character LCD. Wanting to keep these projects in one piece, but not sacrifice his Arduino board, so he etched his own LCD backpack that is Arduino compatible. If you’ve never made it past the Arduino board to build a module that only uses [...]

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Like all of us, [Ryan] is tired of waiting for board production houses. To reduce some of that turnaround time, he modded an Epson inkjet into a PCB printer. The Instructable of his build is extremely thorough and it looks like he’s getting some quality boards out of his project The build started off by [...]

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[Sid] makes a few PCBs a month and the hardest part of his fabrication process is always drilling the through-holes. He has a PCB hand drill that usually results in a sore index finger. After a few unsuccessful attempts of using a full-size electric drill and not wanting to invest in a commercial solution, [Sid] [...]

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Like most of us, [reonarudo] isn’t satisfied with the current methods of homebrew PCBs, so he put a laser on a reprap and started burning some boards. The basic procedure is to cover a copper clad board with matte black spray paint. A laser was installed on the X carriage of the reprap. [reonarudo] used [...]

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While you will often see hacks on this site that feature high voltage, fire, and metal, that doesn’t mean that hackers, makers, and electronics geeks don’t have a soft side. In fact, we find the opposite to be true the vast majority of the time. Take for instance [Bill Porter]. You may have seen his [...]

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Need to use that antiquated hardware that can only be connected via a parallel port? It might take you some time to find a computer that still has one of those, or you could try out this USB to Parallel port converter. It’s not limited to working with printers, as the driver builds a virtual [...]

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[Stynus] was frustrated with the fact that he would have to flip his PCBs over mid way through the exposure process, so he decided the best course of action would be to build his own double-sided PCB exposure box. He scored some UV LEDs on eBay, and after waiting a few weeks for PCBs to [...]

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[Quinn Dunki] got tired of messing around with wires when connecting things to her benchtop power supply, so she built herself useful little power bridge that plugs directly into any standard breadboard. The board is small and simple, but quite useful all the same. It was built to power both sides of the breadboard, and [...]

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We all know that Eagle has its share of shortcomings. Instructables user [westfw] was particularly annoyed by the fact that while Eagle keeps copies of up to 10 revisions of your board, it cannot open those files without resorting to manually renaming each one. Even more frustrating to him is the fact that you can’t [...]

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Instructables user [mzsolt] enjoyed making his own PCBs, but he wanted to speed up the etching process just a bit. While some people put together elaborate bubble tanks and agitators, he wanted to keep his simple and more importantly, cheap. He looked around the house and discovered an ancient CD-ROM drive that was collecting dust, [...]

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Kiss the days of breaking bits while drilling through-hole PCBs goodbye thanks to this semi-automatic drill press (translated). Now it’s not going to line up the bit with the exact location of the hole (that would make it a fully automatic drill press). This works by lining up the board manually, then stepping on a pedal [...]

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[Jonathan Ward] came up with the MTM Snap, a snap-together pcb mill as part of the Machines That Make group at MIT. We covered [Jonathan]‘s previous work made out of half-inch plywood, but the new iteration of his PCB includes a clever snap-together mechanism instead of screws and bolts. Although the MTM Snap looks a [...]

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[Kieth] wanted to use his makerbot for some PCB milling, but he ran into a pretty big problem. The platform that his PCB would sit on was mounted with a layer of double sided foam tape and was not perfectly aligned to the head. Not only that, but it would tilt when pressure was applied. This made [...]

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[Juan Jose Chong] put together a set of videos and a PDF guide to milling printed circuit boards. You’ll find the pair of videos, totaling about twenty-two minutes, embedded after the break. In them, [Jaun] details the techniques used by the IEEE chapter at Texas Tech University to mill PCBs instead of using the traditional method [...]

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Take a moment to think about how many old or damaged computer motherboards you have tossed away over the years. Sure we try to repurpose everything we can, but reclaiming electronic components from complex devices can be overly time consuming if you don’t have the proper means of doing so. Ideally, if we were to [...]

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Magnified glasses A late hacking session, and parts-on-hand came together as the inspiration for [BadWolf's] magnified glasses with LED lighting. Pendulum Printer This orb, when swung like a pendulum, prints images by dropping ink out the bottom. A processing sketch works in conjuction with a Wii Remote and an IR LED in the orb to [...]

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[Martin] had been using standard perf board for most of his electronics projects, but as he was starting to utilize more surface mount ICs, he quickly realized that it was time to start making his own PCBs. Having never etched any PCBs using the toner transfer method, he figured it was as good a time [...]

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Printing PCBs using the toner transfer method works pretty well, but there are some downsides, such as incomplete trace transfers and the like. HackHut user [rucalgary] decided to go the inkjet route instead, and picked up an Epson printer on clearance at his local electronics shop. This method is not new by any means, but [...]

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Here’s a three digit binary clock that [Viktor] designed. It uses a multiplexed display to drive one digit at a time with a PIC 16F628A. The video after the break shows it ticking away, display hours, minutes, and seconds in blue LEDs. You may be wondering why those LEDs are not flush to the board? [...]

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Inspired by a project featured here on Hack-a-Day, [arthurb] bought himself a PIC 24F and started experimenting once he learned the ins and outs of programming the chip. Using a breadboard and a nest of wires was fine for his first few projects, but as he advanced, he began to feel the need for a [...]

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What if there were only two steps for making your own printed circuit board; print, etch? That’s what [Jeff Gough] has been working on and he presented the process in his talk at 27C3. In the first portion of the video after the break [Jeff] talks about various industrial PCB manufacturing processes in a depth [...]

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[Jacques Lebrac] built a UV exposure box for printed circuit boards using just one LED. He usually makes boards that are just a few square inches and didn’t think building a box that had upwards of 80 LEDs was worth his time. He passed by the low power LEDs for a single 5W unit. Pumping [...]

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This drill press was built to drill through-hole printed circuit boards. [Rhys Goodwin] didn’t want to shell out for new equipment, so he dug through his scraps to see what he could accomplish. He already had the power drill, and there was no shortage of wood and fasteners. Once he had a mounting platform for [...]

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