BrainMedley » electronics

Maker Faire ‘08

brain — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:59:02 +0000

Best. Maker Faire. YET. Long lines for mediocre food? Not this year: lots of widely varied food, short lines and at least a few food Makers (which have seemed sorely lacking in past years.) A lot of cool new projects / vendors and better organized by topic / theme. The faire has grown quite a bit and the tone has changed slightly. This year was smoother and more polished than it has been; more people are selling things, but mostly in a good way. I got to make a couple necklaces with PMC, which turns out to be easy to sculpt (as expected) and easy to fire with a Little Torch (pleasant surprise!) Helped kids build Bristlebots at the EMSL booth and, as always, plugged their kits every chance I got. Found a nifty new band and played with fire (not this implementation, but same basic idea; I must build one of these!) Bought some truffle salt and, of course, hauled pinball machines, just to name a few highlights.

Geek Buffet

brain — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:21:17 +0000

Yesterday morning I hit the Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market — lots of fun, I highly recommend it. For flea market n00bs, don’t forget to bring a broad-brimmed hat, a bottle of water and a bag for loot (I forgot the first two), prices are usually negotiable and keep an open mind but not too open. I made a list and mostly stuck to it; I would’ve liked to find more of the stuff on that list, but there’s a lot of stuff there and you really have to sort the stuff you need from the cool stuff you don’t need and the utter crap or you’ll wind up being able to run your own stall So what did I “need”? A few pairs of hemostats, some solder wick, a set of “security” screwdriver bits, a UV LED flashlight, a pair of direct-drive moters with foam-rubber wheels, a game controller with analog sticks I can pull out and play with and a few free transistors (the solder guy has a box of free parts).

Schematic showdown: gEDA vs EAGLE, and the winner is…

brain — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:03:11 +0000

…a sheet of graph paper! I’m only half-kidding, if I had a scanner I probably would do my schematics that way. Both gEDA and EAGLE suck huge hairy balls, and not in a good way. I blame X11 and the myth of “cross platform” for many of the problems, but that doesn’t change the fact that both are incredibly painful to use. (Yes, I use a Mac, no the Mac is not perfect, but pretty much everything I use is vastly more pleasant to use than either of these apps.) Both have obtuse and inconsistent user interfaces, rampant graphical artifacting, and they’re both just plain ugly. That said, I was able to install both, work out how to draw a small scematic in each without requiring instructions, edit them to correct mistakes, and export them to PostScript (and convert that to PDF). Both meet my needs fairly well, though I’ll have to re-test both when I try to design a circuit board. Overall I’m still looking for a solution I actually like, but, despite a rocky start, gEDA seems to suck less; more detail after the jump.

Installation: EAGLE’s installation was pretty reasonable; a reasonably quick download, a quick install script and weighs in around 40 MB. gEDA, on the other hand is, for OS X, only available as a Fink package; I much prefer MacPorts, so I had to install Fink solely to install gEDA and the whole process took about 5 hours and takes up over 1.4 GB – Ouch.

Capabilities: EAGLE is just for schematic and circuit board layout, and those capabilities are handicapped in the free version; gEDA aims to be a full suite of open-source electronic design tools. However I don’t need many of the things gEDA brings along and EAGLE Light’s limitations are not terribly onerous. Both have substantial libraries of parts, and gEDA has an online parts repository (which currently requires URL-hacking to use, webmaster has been notified).

Usage: Both have some similar user interface paradigms, but I find gEDA’s to be slightly cleaner and the keyboard shortcuts are much better: ’s’ for “Select mode”, ‘n’ for “Net mode”, whereas EAGLE uses the F-keys. (In addition to being non-mnemonic, my F-keys are all taken up with things like mute, keyboad brightness, and Exposé.) Also, despite turning on “emulate 3-button mouse”, I couldn’t figure out how to select multiple items in EAGLE, but it’s very natural in gEDA (though it does not give good visual indication of selection, so maybe I got it and just missed it). I don’t like gEDA’s black background, but that can be fixed. I like that EAGLE previews the board footprint of parts when searching, though I had inconstant success getting the part to the page and the part picker goes away when you switch to doing something else and it doesn’t remember where you left the window. gEDA’s part picker window acts more like the “palate” I expect makes it easer to switch back-and-forth between adding parts and connecting them. Finally, I found exporting to PostScript slightly easier from gEDA (and EAGLE does not appear to support printing the 8.5″ x 11″ US Letter size, odd).