Videos

After we interviewed Cameron from Suspect Devices at Maker Faire, our friend Chris from Rocket Brand Studios cornered us for a recursive interview. The video is crowd sourced and we collected as much footage from bystanders as possible.

New York Global Geek Tour 2012 is presented in the video above. We follow our fearless leader as he finds his place in the Big Apple. There’s food, toys, and geeks aplenty.

We’re getting ready for the Global Geek Tour of New York. For those of you who can’t join us at the World Maker Faire, here’s a quick logic analyzer demo using a single block of the Magnificent Nixie Thing we’re tinkering with.

This week we try out the IN12 Nixie tube blocks we’ve been working on. They’ll be on display in the new workshop studio and at Maker Faire New York. We also light up a mini VFD we scored in Akihabara in Tokyo last year. Sorry about the poor lighting, new workshop will be up and running soon.

Today we visit Sjaak’s workshop and talk about a USB 1.8″ TFT Backpack he’s been working on, as well as some history behind the popular ATX Breakout Board.

This workshop video is an absolute first run-through of our USB & Open Source presentation for the Open Hardware Summit 2012. All comments are off the cuff. The final presentation needs to be just under 10 minutes.

Andrew ‘Bunnie’ Huang is a noted open source hardware designer, XBOX hacker, and architect behind the Chumby. He welcomed us into his personal workshop while we were in Singapore for a tour and a few cold Tiger Beers.

Singapore’s Mini Maker Faire had a bunch of unforgettable projects. Check out improvised instruments, PC-controlled toys, a Twitter controlled blimp, the banana piano, a DIY Aquaponics system, and a sling shot controlled Angry Birds clone.

Visit the major electronics shops in Singapore, and get a guided tour of the Singapore hackerspace. This weekend we were in Singapore for the Maker Faire, so we took a day to do a geek tour. This kicks off the second season of our Global Geek Tours.

The Singapore Global Geek Tour video isn’t finished yet, but here’s the complete first cut of the Koba Electronics visit. This little shop in China Town is off the beaten path, but our guide Kelvin arranged a visit.

We got tired of using integrated cam mics for our videos so we bought a Zoom H1 v2 recorder ahead of our Singapore Maker Faire visit. This quick workshop video tests our new sound setup.

Sick of Beige cases are simple protectors and enclosures for hobby electronics project. Design your project with our standard PCB templates and it’s ready for an enclosure.

EEVblog brought up the Bus Pirate LCD adapter this week, so we though it was a good time to talk about the latest v3 hardware revision and do a simple demo. This is a small board that has everything needed to control and test common HD44780 LCD character displays with the Bus Pirate.

Voltage measurements with the Bus Pirate ADC pin are easier than working with a separate multimeter on an analog project. We read a voltage from an MCP4725 I2C digital to analog converter in the demo using the d and D (continuous) voltage measurement commands.

While USB is all around us, the humble (virtual) serial port is still everywhere. Today we explore the serial interface on the Infrared Toy, Bus Pirate, and Logic Sniffer. See a demonstration of the binary interfaces and commands normally used only by software utilities. Grab some terminal software like Tera Term, and Hercules and follow along.

Old ATX computer power supplies are cheap-to-free, and make great lab supplies if you’re willing to add a resistor and short a few wires. Sjaak whipped up an ATX breakout board as an easier way tap and control an ATX supply without any messy hacks.

Flux is a wonderful goo that makes soldering faster and easier. In previous videos we compared different types of commercial flux (Flux off 1, Flux off 2), but did you know it’s possible to make a simple and effective flux at home? We’ll get you started, and don’t miss the giveaway at the end of the video.

We look at the four common ways open hardware is commonly manufactured, and show the package of files we send to get our stuff made.

Here’s some new and extended project interviews from Bay Area Maker Faire 2012. These took place at the setup, faire, and after party. Generally a few people bring projects to show us, so we interviewed them right at our own table.

Experience the Bay Area Maker Faire from the perspective of a presenter. Veteran Makers talk about their projects, and give advice on preparing for your first Maker Faire. We also take you inside the ‘exclusive’ maker-only pre and post parties. You’ve never seen a Maker Faire video like this.

This week we are visiting the Bay Area Maker Faire, so here is a video to explain how we prepare for Maker Faires. You can also check out our Maker Faire tips post, or the wiki version.

Today we play around with the latest USB POV Toy hardware and firmware. The POV Toy is a persistence of vision (not division…) device, but we added some special features. First, a USB connection makes it effortless to upload new patterns. Second, an inexpensive accelerometer actively detects the waving motion and syncs the pattern.

This week the flux-off solder flux comparison returns. Our everyday Edsyn FL-22 goes head to head with two AMTECH syringe fluxes in the TQFP arena. Just for fun, we also tried to solder with shards from a solid rosin block. Find out which flux reigns supreme.

The Part Ninja identifies electronic components like transistors and FETs, and measures basic specifications. Get an overview of this new project in this week’s workshop video. If you’re at Bay Area Maker Faire next month please stop by and see it in person.

Dangerous Prototypes tours the biggest electronics market of all, the Hua Qiang Bei market in Shenzhen, China. This is the third and biggest market on our Global Geek Tour. Be sure to check out Akihabara in Tokyo and Cheonggyecheon in Seoul too.

We toured the offices and factory where Seeed Studio makes open source hardware in Shenzhen, China. All our open source projects are manufactured and shipped from here.

Shenzhen’s Maker Faire was China’s first. It was a huge success, and everyone on our team had a great time. Here’s our interviews with the makers and celebrities.

Dangerous Prototypes drops by the Apliu Street electronics market in Hong Kong on the way to Shenzhen, China. It’s a smaller market, but a great warmup for Hua Qiang Bei.

We toured the prime geek locations in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China on our penultimate Global Geek Tour. Monday thru Friday of next week we’ll have videos, pictures, and giveaways. Here’s a quick preview. Don’t miss a single day or giveaway next week.

This week we build the PIC18F2550 breakout board, and get a box of goodies from Mouser. For this build we used the Goot brand liquid flux , see out how it compares to other fluxes in the flux battle video. For part sources see the Dangerous Prototypes partlist.

Take a tour of our the new workshop that’s setup to document projects and make build videos.

This week we take you on a Global Geek Tour of the electronics markets in Seoul, South Korea. Seoul isn’t known for its markets like Tokyo or Shenzhen, but with electronics giants like Samsung based here there’s a huge and thriving scene.

In an earlier Workshop Video we challenged Sjaak to solder a TMP006 non-contact temperature sensor in a BGA package. We lacked the skills to make it happen, but this week DP engineer Jer shows how he successfully soldered 2 of 4 breakout boards.

Akihabara is a giant neighborhood of electronics stores in Tokyo, Japan. This weekend we explored the markets with Tokyo Hacker Space on the first leg of our Global Geek Tour.

This week we talk about the Free PCB drawer, and show how we mail out all those free PCBs.

Making workshop videos is a lot of fun, but editing the high-def video is painfully slow on even our best CAD workstation. We set out to upgrade one workstation to run Adobe Premiere with a budget of about 500 bucks. It’s not a killer gaming rig, but it encodes videos in minutes instead of hours

We broke out 4 different types of flux we had in the workshop and tried them with surface mount parts. Liquid flux, flux paste, syringe flux, and a flux marker are all tested. We used each to solder a 0805 resistor and some pins of a QFP 0.5mm pitch IC to an xQFP protoboard.

After more than a year of off and on development, there’s finally a working firmware for the USB Persistence of Vision Toy. With a bit more tweaking we’ll be ready to release the code. This week’s workshop video is an overview of the POV Toy project.

Today is the second half of the Bus Blaster v4 workshop video. We solder the board, including two big TQFP chips and a bunch of 0603 passives.

In this video Texas Instruments gets the Big Box award, and we discuss the evolution of the Bus Blaster JTAG debugger.

Workshop update on Bus Pirate firmware, Bus Blaster v3, and Bus Blaster v4. A quick look at our new Nasty Clamp camera tripods too.

We took our cameras on the road and visited Sjaak’s workshop this week. He showed us how he solders QFN chips with a bit of hot air and normal drag-soldering. We also surprised him with a challenge to solder a tiny BGA chip, see how it turns out.