Hackaday Newsletter 0xAC

Hackaday doesn't like elitist jerks. [HACKADAY]() 2024 Hackaday Superconference Speakers, Round One [Read Article Now»]( Against Elitism By [Elliot Williams]( A while back we got an anonymous complaint that Hackaday was “elitist”, and that got me thinking. We do write up the hacks that we find the coolest, and that could lead to a preponderance of gonzo projects, or a feeling that something “isn’t good enough for Hackaday”. But I really want to fight against that notion, because I believe it’s just plain wrong. One of the most important jobs of a Hackaday writer is to find the best parts of a project and bring that to the fore, and I’d like to show you what I mean by example. Take this post from two weeks ago that was nominally about [rescuing a broken beloved keyboard]( by replacing its brain with a modern microcontroller. On its surface, this should be easy – figure out the matrix pinout and wire it up. Flash in a keyboard firmware and you’re done. Of course we all love a good hardware-rescue story, and other owners of busted Sculpt keyboards will be happy to see it. But there’s something here for the rest of us too! To figure out the keyboard matrix, it would take a lot of probing at a flat-flex cable, so [TechBeret] made a sweet breakout board that pulled all the signals off of the flat-flex and terminated them in nicely labelled wires. Let this be your reminder that making a test rig / jig can make these kind of complicated problems simpler. Once the pinout was figured out, and a working prototype made, it was time to order a neat PCB and box it up. The other great trick was the use of 3D-printed mockups of the PCBs to make sure that they fit inside the case, the holes were all in the right places, and that the flat-flex lay flat. With how easily PCB design software will spit out a 3D model these days, you absolutely should take the ten minutes to verify the physical layout of each revision before sending out your Gerbers. So was this a 1337 hack? Maybe not. But was it worth reading for these two sweet tidbits, regardless of whether you’re doing a keyboard hack? Absolutely! And that’s exactly the kind of opportunity that elitists shut themselves off from, and it’s the negative aspect of elitism what we try to fight against here at Hackaday. From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Switching Regulators: Mistake Fixing For Dummies]( By [Arya Voronova]( High-frequency switching regulator design isn't easy, but Arya shows you one way to recover. [Read more »]( [Catching The BOAT: Gamma-Ray Bursts and The Brightest of All Time]( By [Dan Maloney]( We were bathed in gamma rays from an explosion 7.5 billion light years away, and it was bright. [Read more »]( [Meet the Winners of the 2024 Tiny Games Contest]( By [Tom Nardi]( The Tiny Games contest is over, and the entries were stellar. Check them out! [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast Episode 289: Tiny Games, Two Modern Modems, and the Next Big Thing]( By [Hackaday Editors]() What happened last week on Hackaday? The Podcast will get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [The Rise of Self-Cleaning, Cat-Killing Litter Boxes]( [Is That A Coaster? No, It’s An LED Matrix!]( [2024 SAO Contest: The Jolly Tagger Is a Golden Way to Share Info]( [Laser Fault Injection, Now With Optional Decapping]( [Real Time Hacking Of A Supermarket Toy]( [Inviting the Public to Take Stereo Photos for Science]( [Hackaday]() NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA