Lithium technology has ushered in a new era of batteries with exceptionally high energy density for a reasonably low cost. This has made a lot possible that would have been unheard of even 20 years ago such as electric cars, or laptops that can run all day on a single charge. But like anything there are tradeoffs to using these batteries. They are much more complex to use than something like a lead acid battery, generally requiring a battery management system (BMS) to keep the cells in tip-top shape. Generally these are standalone systems but [CallMeC] integrated this one into the buswork for a battery pack instead.

The BMS is generally intended to make sure that slight chemical imbalances in the battery cells don’t cause the pack to wear out prematurely. They do this by maintaining an electrical connection to each cell in the battery so they can charge them individually when needed, making sure that they are all balanced with each other. This BMS has all of these connections printed onto a PCB, but also included with the PCB is the high-power bus that would normally be taken care of by bus bar or nickel strips. This reduces the complexity of assembling the battery and ensures that any time it’s hooked up to a number of cells, the BMS is instantly ready to go.

Although this specific build is meant for fairly large lithium iron phosphate batteries, this type of design could go a long way towards making quick battery packs out of cells of any type of battery chemistry that typically need a BMS system, from larger 18650 packs or perhaps even larger cells like those out of a Nissan Leaf.

What if circuit boards could glow in the dark? It’s a fun question, and one [Botmatrix] sought to answer when approached by manufacturer PCBWay to run a project together. It turns out that it’s quite possible to make glowing PCBs, with attractive results. (Video after the break.)

Specifically, PCBWay has developed a workable glow-in-the-dark silkscreen material that can be applied to printed circuit boards. As a commercial board house, PCBWay hasn’t rushed to explain how precisely they pulled off this feat, but we don’t imagine that it involved anything more than adding some glow-in-the-dark powder to their usual silkscreen ink, but we can only speculate.

On [Botmatrix]’s end, his video steps through some neat testing of the performance of the boards. They’re tested using sensors to determine how well they glow over time.

It might seem like a visual gimmick, and to an extent, it’s just a bit of fun. But still, [Botmatrix] notes that it could have some practical applications too. For example, glow-in-the-dark silkscreen could be used to highlight specific test points on a board or similar, which could be instantly revealed with the use of a UV flashlight. It’s an edge case, but a compelling one. It’s also likely to be very fun for creating visually reactive conference badges or in other applications where the PCB plays a major cosmetic role.

[Botmatrix] says these are potentially the first commercially-available glow-in-the-dark printed PCBs. We love glow in the dark stuff; we’ve even explored how to make your own glowing material before, too. .

 

 

 

 

Do you consider your keyboard to be a fragile thing? Meet the glass keyboard by [BranchNo9329], which even has a glass PCB. At least, I think the whole thing is glass.

There are so frustratingly few details that this might as well have been a centerfold, but I thought you all should see it just the same. What we do have are several pictures and a couple of really short videos, so dive in.

I can tell you that [BranchNo2939] chose a glass substrate mainly due to curiosity about its durability compared with FR4. And that the copper circuitry was applied with physical vapor deposition (PVD) technology.

Apparently one of [BranchNo2939]’s friends is researching the bonding of copper on to glass panels, so they thought they’d give a keyboard a go. Right now the thing is incomplete — apparently there’s going to be RGB. Because of course there’s going to be RGB.

erkbd Can Be yrkbd, Too

Erik + Keyboard = erkbd, and now [EarflapsOpen]’s wide split is open-source and now has a fully documented build guide on GitHub by special request.

Inspired mostly by the Corne and the Void Ergo S layout, this is a 44-key, hand-wired number that runs on a pair of Waveshare RP2040 Zeros programmed with QMK.

I really like the inclusion of OLEDs and rotary encoders, although I feel I would inadvertently turn them by accident. Maybe not. At the very least, they appear to be taller than the keys and might get in the way.

[EarflapsOpen] addresses this a bit at the bottom of the reddit thread, stating that they are not in the way when typing. But since they are kind of far from the home row, you have to move your entire hand to use them. Currently, [EarflapsOpen] uses them for scrolling, adjusting volume, video scrubbing, and so on.

The Centerfold: Battle Axes

So perhaps [delusionalreddit]’s setup is a bit of a departure from the regular centerfold material, but that’s okay. Just look at all those guitars! Yours truly is down to just six or so, and really ought to have them situated similarly around the laboratory. Maybe someday.

So there isn’t much detail here, especially about the peripherals, and I apologize for that. Please see the next paragraph. Almost no one sends me centerfolds! You know your keeb is sexy; now get it out there.

Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!

Historical Clackers: the Williams

When the people demand some new advancement in technology, the early response by manufacturers can sometimes be less than appealing, visually speaking.

This is not the case with the stunning Williams line of  typewriters, which were developed in response to heavy demand for visible typewriters — machines that let the typist see what was being typed without having to stop and do something first. Of course, you could only see a few lines at a time, and just by peering over the tippy-top of the machine, but this was revolutionary.

Form follows function in these lovely machines, which don’t seem to waste an inch of space on frivolity. To create visibility, the Williams typewriters had the platen situated in the center, between two sets of type bars that struck from the front and rear, kicking like grasshopper legs. The paper is first secured along the top and curled downward into the basket.

Don’t quite understand? Don’t blame you. Check out this short video, which demonstrates how to insert paper and type on a Williams Academy model.

Isn’t that cool? The earliest Williams models like the No. 1 pictured above became available in 1891. The keyboard was curved slightly, and the body featured Victorian-inspired filigree. Beginning in 1895, the No. 1 was manufactured with a straight keyboard. The No. 2 came out in 1897 and were nearly identical to the straight-keyboarded No. 1s, but they got an upgrade in the form of typebar alignment. No. 2s were also called Academy like the one in the video, or Englewood.

Inventor John Williams was quite the character and inventor, and was known to rub elbows with Alexander Graham Bell and Emile Berliner. He patented all kinds of things, from cigar cutters to one of the first helicopters in 1912. Unfortunately, the Williams Typewriter Company was fairly short-lived, as they were in litigation for patent infringement pretty much the whole time, until 1909. They were acquired by Jerome Burgess Secor, who would go on to produce a completely different typewriter. Stay tuned!

Finally, Another Use for All Those Melty Beads

So [humanplayer2] was having some fun last Saturday while his daughter played with those melty beads. After some trial and error, it seems we have a new viable switch plate material!

The trial and error was, of course, about finding out what inner bead configuration would result in the snuggest fit. As it turns out, a plain old open square holds them the best, followed by hand-cut-away corners, then full interiors.

For what it’s worth, [humanplayer2] was using Hama beads specifically, which is why the holes are almost all completely melted shut.

Keep in mind that not all melty beads are created equally, so your mileage may vary depending on what you’ve got. But it probably shouldn’t matter too-too much in this case, unless you use the ones that are supposed to be really terrible.

Be sure to check out the custom Hama bead game pad he made for her so she can play Paw Patrol in style.

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Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

[Mikey Sklar] had a problem—namely, running low on the brass material typically used for making PCB stencils. Thankfully, a replacement material was not hard to find. It turns out you can use aluminum business card blanks to make viable PCB stencils.

Why business card blanks? They’re cheap, for a start—maybe 15 cents each in quantity. They’re also the right thickness, at just 0.8 mm, and they’re flat, unlike rolled materials that can tend to flip up when you’re trying to spread paste. They’re only good for small PCBs, of course, but for many applications, they’ll do just fine.

To cut these, you’ll probably want a laser cutter. [Mikey] was duly equipped in that regard already, which helped. Using a 20 watt fiber laser at a power of 80%, he was able to get nice accurate cuts for the stencils. Thanks to the small size of the PCBs in question, the stencils for three PCBs could be crammed on to a single card.

If you’re not happy with your existing PCB stencil material, you might like to try these aluminium blanks on for size. We’ve covered other stenciling topics before, too.

If you’ve ever fancied building a ZX Spectrum clone without hunting down ancient ULAs or soldering your way through 60+ chips, [Alex J. Lowry] has just dropped an exciting build. He has recreated the Leningrad-1, a Soviet-built Spectrum clone from 1988, with a refreshingly low component count: 44 off-the-shelf ICs, as he wrote us. That’s less than many modern clones like the Superfo Harlequin, yet without resorting to programmable logic. All schematics, Gerbers, and KiCad files are open-source, listed at the bottom of [Alex]’ build log.

The original Leningrad-1 was designed by Sergey Zonov during the late Soviet era, when cloning Western tech was less about piracy and more about survival. Zonov’s design nailed a sweet spot between affordability and usability, with enough compatibility to run 90-95% of Spectrum software. [Alex]’ replica preserves that spirit, with a few 21st-century tweaks for builders: silkscreened component values, clever PCB stacking with nylon standoffs, and a DIY-friendly mechanical keyboard hack using transparent keycaps.

While Revision 0 still has some quirks – no SCART color output yet, occasional flickering borders with AY sound – [Alex] is planning for further improvements. Inspired to build your own? Read [Alex]’ full project log here.

Many of us use touch pads daily on our laptops, but rarely do we give much thought about what they really do. In fact they are a PCB matrix of conductive pads, with a controller chip addressing it and sensing the area of contact. Such a complex and repetitive pattern can be annoying to create by hand in an EDA package, so [Timonsku] has written a script to take away the work.

It starts with an OpenSCAD script (originally written by Texas Instruments, and released as open source) that creates a diamond grid, which can be edited to the required dimensions and resolution. This is then exported as a DXF file, and the magic begins in a Python script. After adjustment of variables to suit, it finishes with an Eagle-compatible board file which should be importable into other EDA packages.

We’ve never made a touchpad ourselves, but having dome other such repetitive PCB tasks we feel the pain of anyone who has. Looking at this project we’re struck by the thought that its approach could be adapted for other uses, so it’s one to file away for later.

This isn’t the first home-made touchpad project we’ve brought you.

Jack of all trades, master of none, as the saying goes, and that’s especially true for PCB prototyping tools. Sure, it’s possible to use a CNC router to mill out a PCB, and ditto for a fiber laser. But neither tool is perfect; the router creates a lot of dust and the fiberglass eats a lot of tools, while a laser is great for burning away copper but takes a long time to burn through all the substrate. So, why not put both tools to work?

Of course, this assumes you’re lucky enough to have both tools available, as [Mikey Sklar] does. He doesn’t call out which specific CNC router he has, but any desktop machine should probably do since all it’s doing is drilling any needed through-holes and hogging out the outline of the board, leaving bridges to keep the blanks connected, of course.

Once the milling operations are done, [Mikey] switches to his xTool F1 20W fiber laser. The blanks are placed on the laser’s bed, the CNC-drilled through holes are used as fiducials to align everything, and the laser gets busy. For the smallish boards [Mikey] used to demonstrate his method, it only took 90 seconds to cut the traces. He also used the laser to cut a solder paste stencil from thin brass shim stock in only a few minutes. The brief video below shows the whole process and the excellent results.

In a world where professionally made PCBs are just a few mouse clicks (and a week’s shipping) away, rolling your own boards seems to make little sense. But for the truly impatient, adding the machines to quickly and easily make your own PCBs just might be worth the cost. One thing’s for sure, though — the more we see what the current generation of desktop fiber lasers can accomplish, the more we feel like skipping a couple of mortgage payments to afford one.