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Products that do what I made alchemical-cosmological PCB badges does

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!

  1. 1IM

    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

  2. 2IM

    This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!

    2022 · github.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. 4RE

    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

  5. 5IM

    Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one…

    2024 · paulbupejr.com

  6. 6IT

    Hi HN - My name is Andrew, and I'm a high school student. This is a write-up on StratoSpore, a payload I designed and launched to the stratosphere. The goal was to test if we could estimate physical altitude based on algae fluorescence (using a lightweight ML model trained on the sensor data). The blog post covers the full engineering mess/process, including: - The Hardware: Designing PCBs for the AS7263 spectral sensor and Pi Zero 2 W. -The biological altimeter: How I tried to correlate biological stress (fluorescence) with altitude. - The Communications: A custom lossy compression…

    Nov 2025 · radi8.dev

  7. 7IM

    Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing…

    2024 · github.com

  8. 8IM
  9. 9NE

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

    9d ago · wilsonharper.net

  10. 10AP

    We ported pbrt-v4 to Julia and built it into a Makie backend. Any Makie plot can now be rendered with physically-based path tracing. Julia compiles user-defined physics directly into GPU kernels, so anyone can extend the ray tracer with new materials and media - a black hole with gravitational lensing is ~200 lines of Julia. Runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl, with Metal coming soon. Demo scenes: github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo

    Feb 2026 · makie.org

  11. 11

    The mooooooost nerdiest enamel pin ever

    2025

  12. 12
    Flux250

    ChatGPT for hardware

    2023

  13. 13

    T-shirt that emits cryptocurrency for connecting people

    2018

  14. 14

    Wireless 3D Printing System on Kickstarter

    2014

  15. 15PW

    2019 · littlebird.com.au

  16. 16IB

    We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…

    2025 · tinytpu.com

  17. 17

    10K AI-generated collectibles levitating on ETH blockchain

    2021

  18. 18
    NF2Wear85

    Connecting metaverse to real world. Your NFT on a wearable.

    2022

  19. 19G3

    Hi HN! I've been tinkering with this mini-game / horror experience for a while. I hope it creeps you out! You can go into settings to toggle between 2 different chatbots: a scripted experience (with achievements to unlock) and a more versatile GPT-3 mode. Let me know what you think! :) There's also a toggle to show how the mouse magic is made. Source is available here: https://github.com/baobabKoodaa/ouija

    2022 · ouija.attejuvonen.fi

  20. 20RX

    Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster. I want to share with you all something we've been working on for a while at Lambda: the Razer x Lambda Tensorbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMh6Dhq7P_Q But before I tell you about it, I want to make this all about me, because I built this for me. See, while I'm genuinely interested in hearing from the community what you think as this is the culmination of a lot of effort from a lot of people across so many different fields (seriously, the number of folks across manufacturing, engineering, design, logistics, and marketing who…

    2022

  21. 21IB

    2022 · multiplanetary.website

  22. 22AK
  23. 23MM

    Do you guys remember that magical map from that Harry Potter movie? That thingy a couple of guys at Dropbox made during their hackathon? We took it to the next level...

    2012 · discovercircle.com

  24. 24EA

    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…

    Dec 2025

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