New users probably knowing nothing about Chiphacker and the intent of this question is becoming a reference for them.
So, what is the history of the site Chiphacker?
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\$\begingroup\$ hopefully one person can write up one good answer and it can be accepted, I am not sure this needs CW, we will see. \$\endgroup\$– KortukMay 18, 2011 at 19:15
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\$\begingroup\$ Something long dead and best forgotten? \$\endgroup\$– Nick TMay 19, 2011 at 2:08
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1\$\begingroup\$ @Nick, I don't know. We have a mod that still type "chiphacker.com" to visit this site. \$\endgroup\$– Daniel GrilloMay 19, 2011 at 10:36
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\$\begingroup\$ This doesn't need to be CW. There's nothing wrong with getting rep on Meta! See this question on MSO, and follow the links there for some more discussion on the role of community wiki questions on Meta sites. \$\endgroup\$– Kevin VermeerMay 19, 2011 at 20:02
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2 Answers
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Chiphacker was a Q&A site running the old Stack Exchange platform which was created and administered by Marcus and Maddy of littlebirdelectronics.com as an auxiliary support line for their Sparkfun-like, Sydney-based online electronics shop. It featured the much-loved Electropus (excellent image below found on the twitter account).
While Chiphacker had a fairly vibrant and healthy community (unlike its sister site/competitor Electronics Exchange), it wasn't as successful as it could be, and other SE 1.0 sites were struggling. Stack Exchange Inc. opted to phase out SE 1.0 sites, and started Area51.
The Electronics and Robotics proposal on Area51 was created to replace Chiphacker:
This would be the SE 2.0 version of Chiphacker – Jared Harley Jun 3 [of 2010] at 2:55
At one time, there were three Electronics Stackexchange sites! This question and this question are informative with respect to the migration. In the end, Chiphacker's content (both users and questions/answers) were migrated to the new site, while Electronics Exchange content was dropped.
The original name of the Area51 site was "Electronics and Robotics." After some discussion about creating a robotics-only site, discussion about allowing robotics on the site (for example, here and here), it was decided to remove Robotics from the title and scope.
This resulted in the name "Electronics", which was used during the beta period. However, this caused great stress about the potential for a flood of consumer electronics questions, and we launched as "Electronics Design".
Unfortunately, this caused us to run afoul of someone's trademark. Therefore, we were renamed to "Electronics Engineering", which is our current name. Of course, there are other names that have been proposed...The history isn't over yet!
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Chiphacker was a Stack Exchange 1.0 site:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/changes-to-stack-exchange/
The content of that Stack Exchange 1.0 site, with permission from the site owner, was merged with this Stack Exchange 2.0 site.
