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Products that do what Ember - A hot plate controller powered by USB-C Power Delivery does

Hi, I’m Nathan, an aspiring engineer who likes to tinker with hardware. Earlier this year, I started making hardware/electronic projects through various Hack Club programs. It was perfect, but most, if not all, of my projects were being withheld due to high customs and import fees, so I wanted to change that. Most of the price was actually assembling the PCB, and looking around the internet, I discovered the wonderful invention of the hotplate, and that I could make all of my PCBs myself for more than half the cost. Now, while I could have bought one on eBay, I decided to take up the…

  1. 1IC

    After years of making screwdrivers and teaching people to repair electronics, we just made our first electronic tool. It's been a journey for us to build while hewing to our repairable principles. We're really excited about it. It's a USB-C powered soldering iron and smart battery power hub. Super repairable, of course. Our goal is to make soldering so easy everyone can do it: https://www.ifixit.com/fixhub We didn’t want to make just another iron, so we spent years sweating the details and crafting something that met our exacting standards. This is a high-performance iron: it…

    2024 · hackaday.com

  2. 2RE

    Hey Hackers. This is a project I solo-developed that turns completed PCB assemblies into an easy to use boardview with some accompanying boardscans. There are lots of easier and better ways of doing this, but this is an experimentation to do it as cheaply as possible, with the highest quality and lowest chance of errors. The technical details are in the link. Most public boardviews are almost entirely the result of industrial espionage, other than a few encrypted subscription based software platforms that provide extensive access. The process output is released as donationware, as my main…

    2024 · usoldering.com

  3. 3ID

    3D printing is such a fascinating field of technology, so a couple months ago, I decided to take a deep dive and learn how they actually work! This took me to one of my very first PCB projects, a small, cheap, 3D printer motherboard. While it's not the most cutting edge board, I learned a lot and I fully documented my process designing it (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini/blob/master/J...), so other people can learn from my mistakes! It runs off of an STM32H743 MCU, has 4 TMC stepsticks with UART/SPI configurations,…

    Dec 2025 · github.com

  4. 4
    Fuze116

    Smart card with EMV chip

    2017

  5. 5IM

    I love getting cool swag from hackathons and I also love designing PCB's, so when my friend asked me if I would design hackathon badges for a large game jam in singapore, I was absolutely down! The theme of overglade was a "The game jam within a game", pretty cool concept right! High schoolers from around the world were flown out to the event by hackclub after they spent about 70 hours designing their own game. These badges needed to be really cheap and simple, because we were going to manufacture about a hundred in a pretty limited amount of time. I went with a zero-power approach, which…

    Apr 2026 · github.com

  6. 6NE

    using RF to power an MCU and 21 animated LEDs from a smartphone

    9d ago · wilsonharper.net

  7. 7
    Atech168

    Snap-together electronics built from a chat

    Apr 2026

  8. 8

    A turbo boost for circuit board design

    2016

  9. 9
    Pulse78

    A portable battery charger with a solar panel

    2014

  10. 10
    Arduino111

    Build your own electronics

    2014

  11. 11

    An app that helps you find the right cables.

    2017

  12. 12
    PowerPot105

    Charge your mobile devices with just heat and water.

    2015

  13. 13IM

    Hey guys, A couple weeks ago, I was in Shenzhen, China for a hackathon and on the first day, we all used the one-day PCB fabrication to make PCB badges to wear during the event. I decided to go a little crazy and make some cool 3D alchemical-cosmological badges. It's 3 PCB's stacked on-top of each other that's connected using testpoints on each board. The innerboard has a 10 cent CH32V003 MCU that powers the WS2812B neopixels on the outer rings using the testpoints and shines through using exposed soldermask. If you have any questions about how the design works, feel free to let me know!

    Aug 2026 · github.com

  14. 14

    Instacart for hardware engineers

    2015

  15. 15IB

    I've never posted on ShowHN before, but I wanted to share my Xmas 2025 project; to try a new approach to controlling our kids screen time. This also involved massively over-engineering a solution in order to play with a shiny new gadget (and avoid the in laws at Christmas, obviously) I've shared some learnings on AI coding with embedded devices, and how I approached the product design/hardware selection side of things. The Web App is at https://screenie.org - and I'm Open Sourcing the device and web app code later today (links to follow on that site)

    Jan 2026 · partridge.works

  16. 16IB
  17. 17IV

    The Epilog Zing lasers were 50w desktop industrial lasers from circa 2010. They never had support outside of windows. This was based off of LibLaserCut which is a Java project that reverse engineered these machine's protocols. This is a CUPS driver implemented in Swift and C. Maybe this is a small example of AI doing something positive, like breathing new life into old machines :)

    Dec 2025 · github.com

  18. 18IB

    You know that old TI calculator you used in high school, then put in a box and forgot about? Have you ever wished you had an operating system for your calculator with preemptive multitasking, dynamic memory management, a tree filesystem conforming to the FHS, and all the comforts of Unix? Well, good news: that's totally a thing that exists. I've been working on my kernel for about three and a half years now and I'm looking for new contributors to help out. It's written entirely in z80 assembly, and it's both challenging and fun to work on. There's an IRC channel for contributors or people…

    2014

  19. 19WB

    Title: Show HN: We built an open USB-C Power Delivery analyzer and programmable sink Hi HN! We’re Arbi, Marco, and Rob, and we built Dr. PD to make USB-C power problems easier to understand. It sits between a power source and device, captures and decodes their USB-PD negotiation, and correlates it with voltage and current measurements. It can also act as a programmable sink, with support for fixed supplies, PPS, AVS, and USB-PD 3.2 EPR up to 240 W. Commercial USB-PD analyzers are often priced beyond the reach of hobbyists and independent designers. We are on a mission to make high-quality…

    Aug 2026 · github.com

  20. 20

    Hey yall, I built this for my makerspace. We wanted to let each other borrow things, but also didn't want to put up a big shiny sign saying "hey everyone, my garage has a super fancy oscilloscope just sitting there" and also didn't want to necessarily always need to say yes to everything. However, when I show it to people, they've been suggesting using it for other things like board games, or wedding equipment, etc. I'm still trying to find PMF, so please let me know what you think! For the stack, it's all Elixir + LiveView which is really nice, and then Fly.io, Fly's MPG, Tigris Data,…

    25d ago · toolpool.garden

  21. 21PU

    After seeing a cool demo of a hack on Twitter, I built a cross platform version of it that works well and uses streaming. From anywhere on Mac and Linux, trigger Ollama and optionally feed it your clipboard. I built it yesterday and it's already very useful to me. I'm pretty excited about it and wanted to share!

    2024 · github.com

  22. 22AK
  23. 23PP

    Write up of an embedded project I made to control my analogue synthesizer. Happy to answer any questions or provide any further details of this project if wanted.

    2024 · doug.lon.dev

  24. 24PT

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