Yahya Tawil wrote in to share his review of a web based EDA tool, the EasyEDA. He explains the general structure of this tool and some of its cool features: EDA cloud tools which are related to electronics are emerging exponentially in almost all aspects (i.e. simulation, PCB design, footprint creation, gerber files viewing and 3D […]
Category Archives: site
CHINA STUFF: Email that works…
Working from China is a constant reminder that the location of internet services is super important. North America and Europe are just a few internet hops from our servers in Hetzner’s carbon neutral, green energy data center in Germany. From China, however, we’re often routed out through Beijing to San Jose, then to New York, […]
How to measure laser cut length or time?
To price laser cutting online we need to extract two pieces of info from uploaded design files. The area of a box surrounding the design, called the bounding box, is the amount of material needed. The length of all the cuts in the design can be used as a rough estimate of the cutting time […]
Amazon Web Service Beijing woefully inadequate for international use
Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a bunch of server, storage, and other internet resources. AWS datacenters are located around the world so companies can locate websites close to their customers and speed up page load times. A couple years ago AWS started testing a center in Beijing, China. There’s all sorts of benchmarks on speed […]
Site reorganization complete
Sorry for the occasional outages over the past week. Most were during Chinese work hours, so hopefully not really noticed if you’re in the US or EU. The whole site has been moved into GIT repositories and redeployed as virtual directories as outlined on the blog last week. It is much cleaner, better organized, and […]
Phishing attempt in the forum and how to clean it up
The forum, which runs on the popular phpBB3 software, was hit by a phishing attempt in the last few hours. Around 2000 private messages were sent by hundreds of newly registered users. It’s not clear how this automated attack got past our own spam hammer protection that bars new users from sending private messages. Apologies […]
HOW-TO: Add live websites to GIT without interruptions or security risks
Over at the DEV site we’ve been using GIT repositories hosted at BitBucket.org to push (deploy) changes to the live server instantly. It’s way slicker than uploading changed files by FTP, which has no roll back if something goes wrong. It also solves one of our China internet problems: routing to Bitbucket is much more […]
Sjaak’s Hackershop is open \o/
Sjaak has announced that his Hackershop page is now open! Today is a super exciting day as my friend Ian Lesnet from Dangerousprototypes.com finally got around in rewriting his website (well some parts I guess :) ) He already published parts of the new site (new DirtyPCBS and DirtySLA) , but today he added Hackershops. […]
Global Geek Tour mini site with maps, comments, resources
Geek tourism is a thing. Travel somewhere new, eat the food, drink the beer, and check out the local hacker scene. In Shenzhen we see 5 or 6 visitors a week. Whether a side trip to Akihabara, or a full on expedition through Huaqiangbei, don’t leave home without bookmarking the Geek Tour mini site. Maps […]
Breaking a Teensy U2F implementation: why you shouldn’t write your own crypto
Aidan (a.k.a. makomk) writes: A while ago, Google created a two-factor authentication scheme called U2F. The general idea is as follows. You have a little USB dongle that you can register with sites. When you enable U2F on a site, the dongle gives that site a public key and a key handle, and that dongle […]
Screw it, lets go live! Dev site launch
Dirt cheap SLA 3d prints, custom color PCBs, and not-ripping-you-off pogo test pins are now available at dev.dangerousprototypes.com! We built a bunch of new, no nonsense, instant pricing services modeled after the simplicity of DirtyPCBs.com, please help us test them! Dirty SLA 3D prints – $0.95 per gram for beautiful white SLA 3D prints. Upload […]
MQTT/JQUERY/WebSockets controller
Peter Scargill writes: I wrote a while ago about using web sockets as against something like NETIO for controlling the home – most folk liked the article but I think part of it was a little complicated – and at the time I’d not really thought it out to make it as simple as possible. […]
Mobile site on desktop?
Had a few reports of the mobile site showing up on desktop views. Sorry for the issue and thanks for the reports! We’re checking it out. Deleted any cache, checked cache settings and mod rewrite rules, etc. It’s not happening for us, but if it effects you please let us know in the comments below […]
Stickers!
Stuart tweeted, “A few stickers were visible on my TV spot this evening! @PartsIO @embeddedfm @dangerousproto @hackaday @stem_network”
Sorry for the light blogging
DEV site is nearly working, and digging through our shoebox of receipts doing year end books. Unexpectedly complicated this year due to the Dirty PCBs “joke”. Not so funny now…
3D model .STL to .PNG preview
Bing search sucks. Tried a bunch of ways to get image previews from 3d model .STL files. OpenSCAD does a decent and fast preview, but you gotta figure out where to put the camera for a good scene. The Linux repositories with OpenSCAD are outdated so you have to compile from source. Fire it up […]
Using the RTL-SDR dongle to detect meteors
According to AMSAT-UK, “a new paper has been released by Dr David Morgan 2W0CXV on using the RTL2841 DVB TV Dongle as a SDR processor with SpectrumLab. The paper ‘Techniques for using the RTL Dongle for Detecting Meteors’ covers the setting up and use of the dongle to receive meteor pings from the Graves Radar […]
DIRTY TUESDAY: Measure PCBs and create images from gerber files
A few months ago we started a private PCB website so our team can get cheap PCBs from a fab in China. Someone spilled the beans, and it hit Hack a Day, Hacker News, etc. We almost shut it down, but it was too much fun to hack and refine the process. Dirty Tuesday is […]
DANGERCORE: PHP and Javascript developers needed
Good at PHP and/or Javascript and looking for part time projects? We need to hire a couple PHP and Javascript programmers to work with me on several large projects long term. Some of what we do will be open source immediately, some will need to be secured against hacks a bit first, some will be […]
ESP8266 WiFi chip module
Richard Sloan writes in to highlight his site featuring info on the ESP8266 WiFi module. There is a new IC on the market that is creating a lot of stir, ESP8266 very low cost WIFI chip, available are boards now from China for $5 or less, we are supporting these new IC over at www.esp8266.com […]