Below is a statement from [Jason Calacanis], the owner of hackaday ———————-

HackADay.com, an awesome maker community, is looking for a new home
——–

tl;dr: HackADay is a passionate community of hackers doing awesome stuff. It deserves more attention than I can give it right now, as I’m ultra-focused on the launch of Inside.com. So, we’re looking for a caring new owner with a stellar track record of not f@#$ing up brands to take it over.

——–

We created HackADay back in 2004 because one of Engadget’s awesome bloggers, Phil Torrone, wanted to do super-geeky projects every day and the Engadget audience wasn’t exactly into that frequency.

In a phone call with PT I said, “So you want to do a hack a day?”

He was like, “Yeah, a hack a day.”

And I was like, “OK, let’s do hackaday.com.”

When we sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, we took HackADay out of the deal because it was doing stuff that a corporate parent’s legal arm might not feel comfortable with (e.g., hacking cable boxes!).

So, I bought it and kept it safe and warm inside of Mahalo.com for the past couple of years. However, since I’m super focused on the Inside.com launch, I need to find a new home for it.

It’s doing over $14k a month in advertising without a sales force (just AdSense mainly), and it’s got an amazing stable of bloggers. Given its 6m pageviews a month and with an advertising sales force doing a modest $15 RPM, Hackaday could do $90k a month.

We’ve got 5,674 members of our email list after just five months (should have started it 10 years ago, would have been at 100k+ by now!).

We’ve started doing some epic videos on YouTube. Collectively the videos have over 5m views and 31k subscribers: www.youtube.com/hackaday

This awesome video broke 1m views: http://youtu.be/LZkApleQQpk

Our Twitter handle has 29k followers.

We’re hoping someone like Maker, DemandMedia, InternetBrands, AOL (without Time Warner involved!), Gawker or another publisher can carry on this awesome, profitable and limitless brand.

If you’re interested, send a note to [email protected].

Also, HackADay is looking for a new editor-in-chief. Please send sample projects, posts and whatever else you got to [email protected].

Thanks for allowing me this and for your help with any new home ideas.

best @jason

Farewell Hackaday, the time has come for me to move on. Don’t worry, hackaday will keep going, just like it did when [Eliot] moved on, and [Phil] before him.

I wrote my first post on July 9th, 2008. Since then I’ve had so much fun, and written a total of 1,552 posts (including this one). In my opinion, there is simply no other site like Hackaday.com, our readers are passionate and knowledgeable and it shows, even if some of you are incredibly rude to each other(that’s a sign of passion right?).

While some projects stand out in my mind, it is the people I have enjoyed the most. The people I met when I went to all the different hackerspaces, my co-writers[Mike Szczys] and[Brian Benchoff], past hackaday employees, our commenters,  and even my boss [Jason Calacanis].

If you want to find me, I’ll be at calebkraft.com or on facebook or G+. I have a twitter too, that I guess I’ll start using today.

Join me after the break just one more time while a take a trip down memory lane with a few of my favorite moments from the last few years.  Oh, and yes, I think saying “after the break” is stupid. What else do you say though?

I built some really fun things.

and some things I feel I can be proud of

This controller didn’t help [Thomas] that much, but it gave me the idea for Thecontrollerproject.com which I’m proud to say has already begun helping people.

I drove almost all the way across the country visiting hackerspaces.

I can’t describe how amazing this was for me. I met people from Arizona all the way to South Carolina. I saw hackerspaces that were 110 degrees inside and hackerspaces that were old masonic temples. The people I met were always enthusiastic, helpful and pleasant.

I jammed stuff up my nose for April fools

I made this thing a long time ago and was waiting for a reason to do something ridiculous.  I thought it was a great chance to make fun of the kickstarter emails we get all the time. Yes, I did actually shove that thing into my nasal passage.The links actually went to my personal paypal account too.   I think I actually got about $3 in donations off that form!

I got tazed.

We thought maybe you guys would like some coverage of the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas back in January of 2010. Turns out we didn’t see a whole lot there that we thought you’d be interested in. I stepped up to the plate to take the blame and the punishment.

I had a bunch of other posts in mind, but as I started adding I couldn’t stop. Maybe I should just leave it here.

I’d like to thank the readers again. If it weren’t for your projects happening in your homes, businesses, and hackerspaces, this site wouldn’t exist. You guys are freaking awesome.

[Chris Young] has a physical disability that means he can’t use a mouse very well. He typically uses Dragon Naturally Speaking for moving his mouse using voice commands but has found that it lacks some features he needs and can crash at times.

His solution to this problem was to create a device that will translate IR signals from a simple remote into mouse actions and movements. He is using an Arduino micro for this task, and as you can see in the video it seems to have worked out well for him. He has code and schematics available on his site if you would like to recreate this yourself.

[Chris] has actually built several accessibility devices for himself and others. You should check out his blog for more, including his thoughts on the cost of commercial accessibility equipment vs DIY. If you think you would like to try making a device to help someone with a physical disability access a computer, hop on over to thecontrollerproject.com and join up on the forums.

via thecontrollerproject.com

You could be learning how to be a hero with a wine cork, or how to easily break string without scissors(or your teeth). Need new ways to mount your tablet? We’ve got you covered. However, the story that is probably most important right now is how to keep your ice cream from getting that freezer burnt section on the top.

[Ricky] absolutely loves watching DVDs. He is epileptic and is cognitively functioning at a level roughly that of a 6 year old.  His younger brother [Ronnie] noticed that [Ricky’s] DVDs as well as his DVD player never lasted very long due to some rough handling. [Ronnie] stepped up to make [Ricky’s] life just a little bit easier by building this super rugged DVD watching station.

He started by ripping out the front pcb of the DVD player that has all the buttons. [Ricky] can wear through a set of standard buttons in no time, so [Ronnie] extended these to arcade buttons. Then he mounted everything into a custom cabinet that can withstand a considerable amount of abuse.

Now they can load 5 disks in and [Ricky] can watch what he pleases without worry of destroying the player.

[Ronnie] mentioned that he’d like to make a more complex control system using some kind of microcontroller, but frankly I find the simplicity of this to be perfect. Maybe a media pc loaded with movies might be a decent next step. You can see [Ronnie’s] build log here.

If you’ve ever considered making something like this to improve someone’s life, you should check out thecontrollerproject.com where people with special needs can connect with people who can build interfaces.

Hold on tight. This is going to be a long post. I kept my temper in the video, but here I can just come out and let you know that I’m livid. Every time I start thinking about this, I feel so angry and helpless that my face gets hot and my hands get shaky.  I’m getting ahead of myself though, so lets just back up a little bit and talk about a pretty cool kid named [Thomas].

[Thomas] has muscular dystrophy. This means he’s going to gradually lose strength and control in his muscles over time. He has already lost his ability to stand, and even holding buttons on a game-pad for extended times can be difficult. Gaming, as you can imagine, is very important to [Thomas] and people like him. It offers a release of frustration, like it does for all of us, but also a level playing ground. When he’s in the game, he’s like everyone else.

I did some quick research into what hardware is available. This is where I started to get angry. Something simple like this low pressure switch is extremely overpriced.  Take these two for example. Both are a single momentary switch with a cable and a case.

$70 dollars? $70 F*$&ING DOLLARS? This isn’t the computer interface, this is just the switch. We all know that we can buy those switches at retail prices for under a dollar.   At this point, I thought “man, these companies sure are inflating the price for insurance companies.”

I mentioned the insurance thought to [Thomas’] Mother. She said something that made me want to just sit down and cry right there. She replied “Oh no, the insurance companies don’t usually pay for this stuff. They don’t see it as a necessity.”  Maybe it is because I’m a parent, but this was devastating. I had a hard time even thinking strait after this visit for a while. I was so angry, so frustrated, and feeling so helpless, and I was only tangentially involved.

I made up my mind to do something more than just make a simple controller for [Thomas], I needed to help as many people as possible. More on that later.

[Thomas’] controller.

As you saw in the video, [Thomas] loves to play minecraft. I met with him and talked about what he needed in terms of a controller. At this point in time, [Thomas] doesn’t really need much. He can use an Xbox gamepad, a sixaxis controller, and keyboard and mouse. He has a little bit of trouble holding the triggers for more than a couple seconds, but he gets by.

This meant that I really didn’t have a specific problem to solve so I just tried to build something that would help the most people possible. I jumped from idea to idea, but ultimately fell onto the idea of modular buttons that could be reconfigured as needed.

I used a Teensy with extremely simple keyboard/mouse emulation code. This allows me to give the imputs to the games without the use of additional software.  I should point out here, that this isn’t a new or amazing idea. The super expensive buttons that I mentioned early plug right into something called a “switch box” that emulates mouse and keyboard. Usually the switchboxes even have a ton of features that mine does not have.

All mine does is emulates W,A,S,D, space, escape, E, Q, mouse movement, and right and left mouse clicks. That’s it.  That is all that was needed for minecraft.  I initially started making a system that used headphone jacks, like what I saw on the other systems but then had a better thought. By leaving the headers available, people could literally plug two wires into it and emulate a keyboard press. Need a button that takes very little pressure to activate(very common)? How about no pressure.

Since Thomas can still use a keyboard and mouse, my controller doesn’t help him much. He was a good sport about it, and we’re keeping communication open for the future, because unfortunately, he won’t be able to use the keyboard and mouse forever.

The files

I’m not an engineer. I just looked at what was out there and started doing super quick 3d printed cases. They’re not extremely well thought out, but they work.  Luckily Lulzbot gave me a 3d printer for this project so I was able to prototype and test very quickly. Please download these and improve them.

Here are the parts.

1. low pressure lever activated momentary switch.

Using a dirt cheap 6mm momentary switch, this case uses a lever for activation reducing the amount of pressure required to roughly 15 grams. It works like the one pictured above, and I think even if I include labor in the equation it would be less than $30.  There are several variations mainly because I didn’t have a good hinge idea.

Download the low pressure switch here.

2. The D-pad and quad button

This is simply a case for 4 6mm momentary switches. These have no lever, and require roughly 60 grams pressure to push, which is about the same as an Xbox controller.  They aren’t perfect, but they work.

Some people mentioned that they thought the D-pad needed more buttons to be like the Xbox one. If you disassemble an Xbox controller you’ll see there are only 4 buttons in there. It is NOT an 8 way system.

You can also see the controller shaped block I printed to hold these.

Download the D-Pad file here.

Download the quad button file here.

On a side note, use flexible stranded wire. I have no idea what I was thinking using solid core ribbons here. They won’t last long.

There are a few more files that you can download that came from this project:

The psp thumbstick case

The single button enclosure (unused in the final version)

The blank controller shape for sticking things to.

How can you help?

Like I said. I couldn’t just walk away. I went from thinking I would make [Thomas] a thing, to thinking I’d make a thing that would be perfect for EVERYONE! I even considered doing some kind of kickstarter or something to make a nice little business for myself.  None of those ideas felt right though.

I realized that I don’t need to be the one to help everyone by making a controller. While I did make a thing for [Thomas], my skill isn’t necessarily making stuff. My skill is sharing information, connecting people, and building community.

I have created Thecontrollerproject.com. This is a forum where people can offer their services to build custom interfaces. You don’t need to volunteer your time for free. Even with labor, some of these simple interfaces can be made cheaper at home than the commercial versions.  Many people need customizations that aren’t even available commercially.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd1MkQAdmoU

Many of you are thinking “oh, the engineers will take care of this stuff”. STOP IT. YOU CAN HELP TOO.

I will personally put up easy to follow directions on how you can make some simple devices for people even if you’ve never soldered or touched a microcontroller. If you want to help, you can. Please do. I’m begging.

What if you don’t want to work, you just want to donate?

Fine, that’s good, but don’t donate to me. Go to Ablegamers.com and donate to the Able Gamers Foundation. They are striving for the same goals as me and have their act together.  They are already helping people all over the place and could use your contribution better than I could.  Check out this video below about the Able Gamers Foundation.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen basket weaving done from the point of harvesting the strips from a log. I mean, I knew the bits had to come from somewhere, but usually I see things like leaves or vines. Obviously I just hadn’t really thought about it this way. It is quite interesting.