10 practical tips for designing custom PCB art

The EngineerDog blog discusses ways to design custom circuit board art.

Printed circuit boards are widely recognized for their essential role in electronics tech, but I think they have underappreciated potential as an artistic medium too. The PCB badge projects you see at hacker conferences always catch my eye for their unique look and creativity.

Somewhere along the line KiCad’s open source PCB design software evolved from intolerable into something I enjoy using.

I set a goal for myself to produce a birthday cake badge in time for my daughter’s 7th birthday at the end of the month!

In this post I’ll share some practical tips I picked up along the way plus a new product reveal!

Check out the process and tips in the post here.

And check out some PCB Art tutorials in the Adafruit Learning System here.

Raspberry Pi BMO TV #piday #raspberrypi

If you appreciate the fun-loving BMO, why not watch TV on them all day long with this cool Raspberry Pi project from Golbscholar. Tom’s Hardware shares.

After airing more than a decade ago, you can still find dedicated fans for Adventure Time like maker and developer Golbscholar. Using our favorite single board computer, the Raspberry Pi, they managed to create a TV shaped like the character BMO that automatically plays episodes of the show on loop.

Read more.

---

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

File Browser on the Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

How to navigate files on your Raspberry Pi? With the easy to use File Browser. Here’s how from PiMyLifeUp:

File Browser is an incredibly simple-to-use file manager that you can utilize entirely from your web browser. This web interface allows you to upload, download, and delete files and folders from your file system.

This software can be great to run on your Raspberry Pi if you want to manage files remotely without needing any specialized software.

Learn more!

---

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

LED Festival Coat with Mapping and WLED #LED Pixels #AdafruitLearningSystem @Adafruit

Check out the latest guide from Erin St Blaine: add lights to your festival coat and control the lights with your phone. This guide will show two different ways to add animated NeoPixel lights to your favorite furry festie warmie. From the guide:

Hold onto your hat, ’cause your threads are about to get a serious upgrade, man. We’re talkin’ LED lights for your furry coat, but not just any lights, my friends. We’re talkin’ lights that’ll have you struttin’ like a disco diva under the neon glow.

This guide will demonstrate two different methods of lighting up a coat:

1. Fur Trim Lights: String LED lights inside the ubiquitous furry trim that’s found on so many Festival jackets. This is a fairly easy build that doesn’t require a lot of sewing or coding skills.
2. Light Matrix Panels: Create a 3-panel LED matrix between the coat fabric and lining that runs 2d animations on the body of the coat. This is a more complicated build that requires some coat deconstruction and sewing, and requires some detail-oriented number work to get the LED map created.

Watch a video of the coat in action on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_wrw9c-9wPg?feature=shared

Content Summary:
– The guide provides instructions for creating a festival coat with LED lights, offering two methods: simple fur trim border lights and more complex light matrix panels with LED mapping.
– It details the process of installing WLED on a microcontroller, setting up WiFi and LED preferences, and testing the setup through a web-enabled device.
– The guide also covers considerations for coat selection, LED layout and density, power limitations, and assembly steps for both the Feather microcontroller and LED strips.

Adafruit Products Summary:
– The NeoPixel strand is connected to pin 13 on the Adafruit Feather microcontroller, which is the brain of the LED festival coat project. [Feather](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3403)
– A USB power switch tail is used to connect the Feather’s USB port to the battery, providing power to the LED lights. [USB power switch tail](https://www.adafruit.com/product/1620)

Read more at LED Festival Coat with Mapping and WLED

A USB keyboard/mouse to PS/2 interface converter using a Raspberry Pi Pico #RaspberryPi #VintageComputing

ps2x2pico is a USB keyboard/mouse to PS/2 interface converter using a Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is connected to a USB keyboard and/or mouse using a USB OTG-adapter and optional USB hub. It also works with wireless keyboards and mice with a dedicated USB receiver.

There are also sister projects:

• ps2pico – a USB keyboard to PS/2+AT or XT interface converter
• hid2cdc – USB keyboard to USB CDC converter

See more on GitHub.

Lily Clark’s Sculptures Play with Surface Tension #ArtTuesday

Lily Clark’s sculpture “Dew Point” creates beads of water seemingly from nowhere. Surface tension holds the beads together as they roll to the center of the sculpture. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

Although Los Angeles-based artist Lily Clark incorporates stone, wood, and metal into her sculptures, she considers water her primary medium. One of her more recent works, “Dew Point,” explores the supple, plump shape of the life-giving liquid as it condenses and succumbs to gravity. A boxy sculpture with a wide but shallow depression, the superhydrophobic ceramic piece pushes individual droplets to the surface seemingly from nowhere. Each ultimately tumbles down into a slender slit in the middle of the form, before returning to repeat the cycle.

See and learn more!

---

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Guess My RGB

Guess My RGB is an in browser color guessing game where players move RGB sliders to determine the page’s RGB color by susam on GitHub, via neatorama