Design News posted an introduction to the Bus Pirate with a short review: Thumbs up I think Bus Pirate is an interesting project and a very useful tool to have available at the price. I think a great addition to this project would be a GUI front end that would allow you to point/click to […]
Author Archives: Ian
FTDI 5 minute support response
FTDI tech support took less than 5 minutes to respond to our hardware-related query. Where have you gotten excellent support? Public domain photo by DustyDingo.
Import images into Cadsoft Eagle
We’re trying to take it up a notch by adding the Dangerous Prototype logo to future PCBs. We weren’t sure how to do this in Cadsoft Eagle, so we thought we’d share what we did. The Cadsoft miscellaneous downloads page has a number of utilities and Perl scripts that convert images to Eagle compatible scripts. […]
Bus Pirate support in Flashrom project
Flashrom is an open source utility for working with flash storage chips. It supports a bunch of flash chips commonly used on motherboards to hold the system BIOS. biosflasher (Carl-Daniel Hailfinger) recently added Bus Pirate support to Flashrom. It should be possible to program SPI flash chips using the next release of Flashrom and the […]
Bus Pirate probe cable unboxing
s3c shared this picture of a Seeed probe cable kit (left) and a homemade cable (right). What we liked most was getting a glimpse at the workspace.
#twatch: PCBs available at Seeed
Seeed Studio has v2 Twitter Watcher #twatch PCBs for $6, be sure to get the right ethernet jack ($1.90). These are the extra boards from our Fusion PCB service order (formerly propaganda PCB service). Assembled versions of our Twitter ticking, ethernet LCD backpack are also available for immediate shipment. A #twatch with LCD is $45, […]
Free PCB Sunday: Hackable Christmas ornament
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. This week we’re giving away free PCBs for the Hackable Christmas ornament. We made these […]
USBprog
USBprog is an open source multi-chip programmer. It currently programs AVRs with an ISP mkII clone, does JTAG debugging with OpenOCD, and some other stuff. We’re going to take a close look at the source and protocol used with OpenOCD to see if it can be implemented in the Bus Pirate. Thanks for the tip […]
Zeno zit zapper tip reset
The Zeno is an acne treatment device with disposable tips that are electronically limited to 45 or 60 uses. Matt did a system teardown that revealed a Cypress cy8c27443 microcontroller in the main unit and a 128byte I2C EEPROM in the tip. He used the Bus Pirate to sniff I2C traffic going to the EEPROM […]
The 'us too!' Black Friday post
Today is Black Friday, the bustiest shopping day in the US. Every kit-biz is promoting their wares (Adafruit, Make, HacknMod), here’s our plug. In the past three months we’ve released three geeky open source projects that you can buy at Seeed Studio: #twatch network LCD and Twitter scroller ($45 w/LCD, $30 without, shipped) Bus Pirate […]
Bus Pirate Mac-to-basics
Ril3y, designer of the laser etched Bus Pirate case, has a short introduction to using the Bus Pirate with a Mac.
Bus Pirate restock
Bus Pirate v3 preorder 2 is almost sold out. Bus Pirate v3 preorder 3 is now online. Seeed Studio made some additional Bus Pirates, but they won’t ship until next week when the current backlog is cleared. Seeed should list them ASAP. If you want one and they’re sold out, please check back in a […]
#twatch Perl library
philalex wrote a Perl library to control the #twatch. You can leave suggestions and comments in the forum.
Seeed Studio 15% off sale
Most items are 15% off at Seeed Studio today. This doesn’t seem to apply to our projects, we’ll try to get them included in future sales. We’ve been eying these well-organized, but expensive, 0805 resistor and capacitor value sample books. 15%-off might sweeten the deal.
C programmer needed for PIC support!
We’re looking for a C programmer who can add serial port output to usbpicprog. It’s all that stands in the way of bringing PIC 12F/16F/18F/ds30 programming to the Bus Pirate*. usbpicprog is an open source multi-platform programmer that uses wxWidgets toolkit and libusb. It currently sends byte commands to a USB HID driver. Your goal, […]
SparkFun XMOS dev-board
Uwe sent some photos of an XMOS development board from SparkFun. We had never heard of XMOS, but Uwe explains: The XMOS concept can be seen in direct competition with FPGAs – simple logic design in software (C/C++) using very complex standard logic cells (XCORE) while FPGAs use far simpler standard logic cells that require […]
Laser etched Bus Pirate case
Ril3y made a fantastic laser etched Plexiglas case for his Bus Pirate v3 with a command cheat-sheet etched onto the bottom. There’s more pictures of this awesome case in his Flickr photo stream. Bus Pirate preorder 2 should ship this week. There’s still a few (<30) extra preorder 2 Bus Pirates at Seeed Studio, get […]
Bus Pirate PIC programmer?
Last week we made the Bus Pirate into an AVR STK500v2 compatible programmer by porting some existing open source code. Now we’re looking for a similar code-base that programs PIC microcontrollers. The PIC programmer landscape is a bit sketchy. As we understand, it’s not feasible to impersonate an existing programmer interface like the PICKIT2 or […]
Bus Pirate v3 unboxing
Here’s another Bus Pirate v3 unboxing, keep them coming! Preorder 2 should ship this week. There’s still a few (<30) extra preorder 2 Bus Pirates, get one while you can.
Chips: 1-Wire iButton overview
See the latest version in the documentation wiki. Reliq sent a 1-Wire iButton demo using the Bus Pirate: I work in an engineering firm, and the large format color printer we have uses iButtons on the ink tanks to tell the machine what has been plugged in. These particular buttons are write-only. As you can […]