OggCamp 2024: The Printer That Took A Decade To Tune
Last updated: 12 Oct 2024 - 15:17
At OggCamp this year I was on the scheduled track and presented a brief history of my RepRap 3D printer on the main stage. The printer is over a decade old but spent a few years in a box. Actually I've been working on it for about 8 years now but I hope it will be done in the next 2 years...
I should document all this in detail but I don't really have time. For now you can take a look at the slides to see a history of my printer.
KiCAD Forums
Last updated: 30 Aug 2014 - 16:08
A few weeks ago Chris Gammell (of The Amp Hour and more recently Contextual Electronics) has released his set of KiCAD videos, and set up a forum for users to discus the software, all available on the new kicad.info site. I've been using KiCAD for about 6 years now (I looked up my first PCB order I designed with it and it was September 2008) and whilst I happily recommend it to anyone who wants to get into PCB design, I've completely forgotten how complex it is to learn to use. I think the video series is a great starting point and the forums are a good way to troubleshoot specific issues you have. There are a good number of people on there now but the more people, the better the range of discussion. There are a couple of existing mailing lists for KiCAD, the developers mailing list on Launchpad and a users mailing list which is a Yahoo group that always gave me a really terrible user experience. The new forum is much more intuitive and interactive.
Announcing the OggBox Project
Last updated: 14 Aug 2012 - 22:03
The OggBox is a simple, hackable open hardware music player. It's a pocket sized device, about the size of a smart phone which can play or record open formats to or from an SD card. It will support Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and WAV files, but has only been tested on Ogg so far. The hardware was designed in KiCAD and all the files are available to download and use (CC-BY-SA).
KiCAD Open Source Schematic to PCB Tools
Last updated: 07 Feb 2012 - 22:19
You may have noticed in the schematics I post for various projects that I use KiCAD for all my designs. It's a free and open source package with no limitations on part count, pin count or board size. The software is cross platform, supporting Linux, Mac and Windows, and on Linux you'll probably find it in your distribution's repositories. Unlike the other big open source electronics design software gEDA it is fairly intuitive and not that different from other commercial packages I've used (OrCAD or Altium Designer). Unlike cost free versions of proprietary software like Eagle there are no reasonable limits on the board size, part count or pin count that you can create with this software and while it lacks some advanced features such as more complex curved pad shapes etc. it is very stable now and is well up to commercial work.
OggCamp 11: Open Source Hardware - Beyond the Arduino
Last updated: 23 Jul 2011 - 21:34
I'm going to be at OggCamp again this year. I'm planning a talk for the barcamp on open source hardware, particularly hardware more powerful or less well known than the Arduino. The ChipKIT will feature in the talk and hopefully the Pong game will be there for you to play. I'm also going to be bringing a ChipKIT MAX32 for the raffle courtesy of Farnell, so for your chance to win this awesome board, you need to come along.