Happy New Year, Hackaday! | Hackaday
[Tom Nardi] and I have been chatting on the podcast about 2022, and how it went from the hacker’s standpoint. As the world-wide chip lack entered its second total year, we the two thought back on the techniques that we all experienced to adapt and get the job done all around the truth that we just couldn’t get the sections we have been accustomed to finding up with relieve.
What experienced beforehand been an infinite provide of knockoff Arduino clones and STM32 Blue Tablet boards all of a sudden just dried up. In some cases you just couldn’t get the DAC chip you required, or at least not devoid of quite a few weeks’ guide time, and even then, it’d expense you. Raspberry Pi one-board computer systems grew to become really hard to locate. PCB layouts had to modify and new SDKs needed to be learned. I know I had to grab 2 times for unfamiliar microcontroller platforms this year.
We hacked all around the issues. It would be absurd to say that the chip scarcity was not a pain in the posterior, but in the end we all managed to have on and preserve creating. We designed a lot more versatile footprints, learned to design and style close to what we could get, and certainly experienced to do extra setting up. We pulled parts for tasks out of the junk box or shelf inventory. Or, as Tom observed, we did what absolutely everyone in the pieces of the planet who are not as privileged to get free expedited shipping does – we made do.
Generating do usually meant studying new environments, questioning outdated routines, and double-checking pinouts. But if you’re like me, not all of that time was squandered. In some cases it’s excellent to get shaken out of comfortable workflows, even if by force. So even though we want you sections-in-stock and straightforward availability for 2023, don’t neglect the classes discovered from 2022. Remain scrappy, Hackaday!
