There are certain design guidelines for PCBs that don’t make a lot of sense, and practices that seem excessive and unnecessary. Often these are motivated by the black magic that is RF transmission. This is either an unfortunate and unintended consequence of electronic circuits, or a magical and useful feature of them, and a lot…
Author: Bob Baddeley
Creating an Automated Optical Inspector for $50
In the world of electronics assembly, parts are really small, quantities are really large, and equipment is really expensive. The process of putting all the components onto circuit boards thousands of times per hour with really high accuracy is challenging, but tools are getting easier and cheaper every day. At my job (Quietyme), we’re doing…
Anglerfish for Bikes
Originally intended for Burning Man, this device has usefulness more and more in our world as people embrace biking. Cars have had this feature for years; push the button on your keys and the car honks and the headlights flash. Why can’t we have that for bikes? This devices use a long range Bluetooth Low…
Side project – Mallards Fast Pitch
My hackerspace Sector67 was approached this winter with a problem; the local minor league baseball stadium (Madison Mallards) fast pitch sign was old and no longer working, and they wanted some help fixing it up. In exchange for our expertise, they promised significant advertising and publicity, and they would have us be special guests at a…
My ONE post on gun control
This post is about my attempt at a technological solution to gun problems. I built a working prototype, but ultimately I believe that this is not a solution to the problem of mass shootings. There is no technological solution that will prevent someone who is sufficiently motivated from doing significant harm yet still afford us…
Post-China update
Yep, I haven’t updated in a while. So what happened in the last year? Went to china to participate in HAXLR8R, the first hardware startup accelerator, which took place in Shenzhen. Read about it here! Came back a few weeks early because I couldn’t get what I needed there, went to San Francisco for demo…
I’m going to China!
A couple months ago I applied for a program in its first year for hardware startup companies. Called HAXLR8R, the goal of the program is to make manufacturing in China more accessible to startups by providing workspace and tools and mentors and experts to ten teams for three months in Shenzhen. After those three months,…
A Kalahari Christmas
After Erin took me on a ski trip to Salt Lake City for Christmas 2010, I was far behind in the Christmas Karma. For 2011 I planned to take her to a resort in Wisconsin Dells, which is sort of like the Las Vegas of Wisconsin, except with water parks instead of casinos. Of the many resorts,…
The Plan
It occurred to me that a lot of people may be out of the loop with what has been and will be happening over the next while. Here’s a short description of the plan: Erin is going to graduate school in Madison, WI, and I am moving with her. On July 31 our apartment lease…
Fast Scanner
Since I’m moving in a few months to an apartment of significantly reduced size, I am starting to reduce the size of my collection of stuff. One thing I’ve been carrying around is everything from my college career. I have every syllabus, paper, homework assignment, handout, midterm… in total it was three boxes full of…