News

We're firm believers that electronics can be beautiful, and we're not alone. Our good friend Saar Drimer at circuit design specialist Boldport has made a career out of creating printed circuit boards that are both functional and elegant, typically with the aid of his PCBmodE software. Now, Saar is looking to increase the flexibility of circuit design still further by working with manufacturing house Eurocircuits to create multi-coloured boards. Where traditional PCBs house a maximum of four colours - the board colour, the copper layer, a solder-mask layer, and a silk-screen layer - Saar has extended this considerably by adding...

Although we here at oomlout have a great love for local manufacturing, we're also massive fans of Shenzen's Hua Qiang Bei. For those unfamiliar, and who haven't seen our handy-dandy Hua Qiang Bei System (华强北) open map of the area, Hua Qiang Bei is the centre of the world when it comes to electronics and home to shops selling everything from high-grade test equipment to broken-down mobile parts. We're not alone in our admiration for the area, either: our good friends at Seeed Studio understand our love of the region and have demonstrated their own with a list of their...

The most wonderful time of the year is approaching! No, not Christmas: preparations have started for the Halifax Mini Maker Faire 2015. While we have a lot of love for the national Maker Faire events, the local Mini variants offer us a chance to meet up with fellow UK Maker Belt denizens and talk about the hobby that brings us all together. Last year's début Halifax Mini Maker Faire was a blast, and there's no reason to think this year's will be any less enjoyable. For anyone wanting to join us in exhibiting - and, remember, it's open to anyone...

We absolutely love laser cutters here at oomlout, from teeny-tiny desktop models through to the industrial units we use for our own products and everything in between. We've previously shown how they can be used to build everything from hinges to knobs, and now Instructables user Kiki Brown Bear has demonstrated a handy method for turning flat laser-cut acrylic into three-dimensional objects with nothing more complex than a household oven. The shapes, cutlery in Kiki's case, are heated in the oven then pressed onto a mould. For Kiki's project, that simply meant pressing her plastic cutlery shapes onto commercial metal...

The Arduino platform is frequently seen as the domain of hobbyists thanks to its low cost and open-hardware nature. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place on a professional's workbench, though, as Vela Labs' Matt Kane has deftly proven. Matt is working on building a high-speed camera flash, and uses an expensive photodetector connected to an even more expensive oscilloscope to do comparative testing. Realising that end-users wouldn't have easy access to nor budget for such equipment if they wanted to benchmark their existing flash units, Matt built a flash speed tester using an Arduino Leonardo, cheap photodiode...