Author Topic: Hackaday Rant  (Read 6103 times)

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Offline asmi

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #25 on: December 14, 2020, 04:19:21 pm »
You guys have way too much spare time, as you apparently have time for both reading this stuff AND ranting about that. I wish I would have at least 10% of that time...

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #26 on: December 14, 2020, 04:22:53 pm »
vchaney:  "I have been making things all my life, for art, for fun, and for practicality."
(source https://www.instructables.com/Middle-of-the-Night-Bathroom-Light/)





Hackaday reader:  "This is not real engineering, stop having fun!"

 
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Offline Yansi

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #27 on: December 14, 2020, 04:32:52 pm »
Dear rogeorge, it is a big difference in making a stupid flashlight powered from two AA cells, and stuff powered from mains or other similar stuff, that can easily cause the user a harm, or property damage.

So, if you like having fun, then have yourself fun, but do not sell your ideas to others, as the correctly engineered form.

Just too many times I've been put in a situation, where a company needed something (cheap was likely the priority over everything else) and hired the first clueless "duino eng-uh-neer" to do the job. I was then the one cleaning the mess after, redoing all once again.
 

Offline rdl

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #28 on: December 14, 2020, 04:58:00 pm »
As several others have said, just visit the blog. Every now and then something good pops up and it's quick and easy to skim past the useless stuff. Comments are sometimes worth reading. I try to pay them a visit once a week or so.

http://hackaday.com/blog/
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #29 on: December 14, 2020, 05:41:56 pm »

There are many levels of car enthusiast...  from the teenager putting a chrome exhaust tip on a beat up Honda Civic, to the 60-something man that sand casts his own engine...

There are many levels of electronics enthusiast too?
 

Offline Yansi

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #30 on: December 14, 2020, 05:46:44 pm »
Sure there are, but please learn where to draw the line between a hobbyist maker and an actually engineered product.

As I've said, way too often to those hobbyists makers put their hand on stuff they should definitely not touch.

I am fine with people doing dangerous stuff at home, but selling your *duino controller for 5 or 6 industrial drying gas fired furnaces to an industrial company, is a completely different matter. All fun ends there! *

//* an actual example, what I have once stumbled upon
« Last Edit: December 14, 2020, 05:51:19 pm by Yansi »
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #31 on: December 14, 2020, 05:51:43 pm »
Sure there are, but please learn where to draw the line between a hobbyist maker and an actually engineered product.

As I've said, way too often to those hobbyists makers put their hand on stuff they should definitely not touch.

I am fine with people doing dangerous stuff at home, but selling your *duino controller for 5 or 6 industrial drying gas fired furnaces to an industrial company, is a completely different matter. All fun ends there!

You only learn from touching things you shouldn't touch.   There are those who believe you should do something that scares you every day, or you are not moving forward!
 

Offline Yansi

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #32 on: December 14, 2020, 05:54:13 pm »
I am not really scared controlling gas furnaces with a proper industrial grade PLC with properly wired interlocks. But I wouldn't sleep well, using a duino board for that. Miracle none of the furnaces has blown up!
 

Offline phil from seattleTopic starter

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #33 on: December 14, 2020, 07:55:05 pm »
Sure there are, but please learn where to draw the line between a hobbyist maker and an actually engineered product.

As I've said, way too often to those hobbyists makers put their hand on stuff they should definitely not touch.

I am fine with people doing dangerous stuff at home, but selling your *duino controller for 5 or 6 industrial drying gas fired furnaces to an industrial company, is a completely different matter. All fun ends there!

You only learn from touching things you shouldn't touch.   There are those who believe you should do something that scares you every day, or you are not moving forward!
That's not the issue Yansi was pointing out. The issue is clueless types pushing ideas that will get someone hurt.

My favorite example of this is a clueless makerdroid pushing his Plasma Cutter Torch Height Controller. Yup, Arduino based. But that's not the real issue.  Plasma cutters output a torch voltage that is proportional to the height of the metal being cut. Nominally correct voltage is 100V which is sometimes divided down by the plasma controller - sometimes not.  This guy takes the plasma voltage directly into the ADC of the Arduino by jamming the wire into the socket header on the Arduino.  He also uses a 100 uF electrolytic cap between the torch voltage signal and ground. He does this by jamming the cap's lead into the same socket as the torch voltage lead.  So, no isolation, the torch voltage wire is not safely secured and the electrolytic cap is probably rated for 25V.  I tried to explain the error of his ways but he wasn't having any of it. I also explained that he could get a much more effective and safe low pass filter with a resistor and a safer cap in the 100 nF range. No taking that one either. And he has several people building his design. One guy got it working but then it died.  He's lucky he didn't die but I'm sure he will keep at it.
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #34 on: December 14, 2020, 11:32:13 pm »

People routinely do very dumb things.  Including the undersigned!  :D
 

Offline zitt

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #35 on: December 19, 2020, 03:54:50 am »
I entered one of their early contests with my very detailed worklog of building a complete pinball machine complete with custom designed boards.
https://hackaday.io/project/674-star-trek-the-mirror-universe-pinball

If you'd rather read about it in a more traditionally website:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/star-trek-mirror-universe-pinball

Anyway; the project lost out to some really perplexing projects. I lost all respect for that "website" that day.
 
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Offline DrG

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #36 on: December 19, 2020, 04:14:03 am »

There are many levels of car enthusiast... 

I can relate. I was a master of the $12 Thrush Muffler and any variety of muffler tape and hangar wire. Add a hacksaw (to work on that long front pipe that was rotting) and I drove cars (without getting pulled over) that had no right to burn petroleum products. Yeah, good times.

Oh Hackaday, dunno seems like there are a lot of parts to that. Sometimes it is interesting. I remember a chat with that hot blonde lawyer/poker player and a guy from a computer museum and a few others that were kind of interesting. More often than not it just features a link to the real product/site, and a never-ending variety of clocks.
- Invest in science - it pays big dividends. -
 
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Offline Ed.Kloonk

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #37 on: December 19, 2020, 04:33:00 am »
I entered one of their early contests with my very detailed worklog of building a complete pinball machine complete with custom designed boards.
https://hackaday.io/project/674-star-trek-the-mirror-universe-pinball

If you'd rather read about it in a more traditionally website:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/star-trek-mirror-universe-pinball

Anyway; the project lost out to some really perplexing projects. I lost all respect for that "website" that day.

I ain't seen anything like it, in any amusement hall.
iratus parum formica
 

Offline Syntax Error

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #38 on: December 19, 2020, 01:30:05 pm »
The Hackaday website is an omnishambles. Possibly one of the worse functioning sites outside of the Amazon storefront. Certainly most projects should come with a health or safety warning. Perhaps Hackaday could add a category that reads, "x people were hospitalized by this project. Thumbs."

As for the makers on there? They're not cutting edge engineers with fellowships of the IEEEEEE-whatever, they are just makers making stuff . Stuff like this...

I suspect Moz powered his 'Internet in a box' using an Arduino running the blink sketch. Definately a hackaday project.
 

Offline medical-nerd

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #39 on: January 01, 2021, 11:42:04 am »
Hiya

I check out Hackaday a few times each day - I usually find a couple of articles that are interesting, especially the retro ones.
If you don't like an article just skip it. I'm sure most of us have subscribed to magazines to find editions that have no interest at all.

Hackaday.io however is a nightmare.

Cheers

Steve
'better to burn out than fade away'
 

Offline Sonic2k

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Re: Hackaday Rant
« Reply #40 on: November 13, 2022, 06:52:54 pm »
I had a look at this hackaday.io site today and then I found this forum post.

This is my take on the whole "makerspace" and "hackerspace" that's suddenly popped up in recent years.

I think its all glam, in the same sense as reality TV.

I have seen absolute rubbish get all the attention on hackaday.io. There is an argument that these people are not professionals, but there's also a fine line between someone who is a hobbyist and a professional. Beneath all of them is the makerspace. Today's hobbyists are not capable of going head to head with hobbyists that were around in the 80s when I was growing up.

In the main I have found that its programmers, IT people who fancy themselves as electronics engineers that go into this space. Then you have also, these people raised on reality TV and YouTube, that go and buy an Arduino, use the examples to do things and then proclaim they're God's gift to mankind.

Where were all these people when I put in all the hard graft to figure out the 8051 microcontroller without no internet resources and just a photocopy of the reference manual?
All their methods are shocking... they work untidy, and I've said it before... this week past in fact. Some clever bloke thought it was OK to run a Z-80 MCU from the mains using a zener-resistor dropper.
When I said that the entire system is at mains potential and a lethal shock hazard. I got banned.
 


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