arhi posted an update on his HAKKO soldering pencil driver: The driver actually works like a charm – if you take the “numbers” on display as some “arbitrary value” and not temperature in C :D. The tip temperature is held pretty good and it all works great, it’s just that “values” are meaningless. The 500C […]
Author Archives: Ian
Animatronic neck
Chris from Pyroelectro is now experimenting with adding a new dimension to this robotic face, an animatronic neck: Having already built the eyebrows, eyes and mouth for our animatron, the final step will be to affix it to a neck so that it can rotate left and right, and tilt up and down. This means […]
Atmel AVR Dragon vs the Kraken
Null Space Labs was tired of fighting the Dragon Atmel AVR debugger, so they make made their own programmer called the Kraken: The dragon is a terrible piece of hardware when it doesn’t work right, which is often. It has a design flaw that causes a couple of chips to blow up regularly, so regularly […]
Forked Bus Blaster FT2232H + CPLD JTAG programmer
irrenhaus finished his forked Bus Blaster v2 design. Like the BBv2, this board has a FT2232 USB->JTAG chip and a CPLD buffer. It uses a bigger 100pin CPLD, with enough IO to connect to every pin of the FT2232. The extra connections are used to supports the SWO feature of the new 2-wire SWD JTAG […]
Another passive Ethernet sniffer
orcinus found another tap for monitoring Ethernet communications: The Throwing Star LAN Tap is a passive Ethernet tap, requiring no power for operation. There are active methods of tapping Ethernet connections (e.g., a mirror port on a switch), but none can beat passive taps for portability. To the target network, the Throwing Star LAN Tap […]
Testers needed: USB Infrared Toy firmware v20 release candidate 1
We are exceedingly proud to announce the first USB IR Toy firmware using an open source USB firmware. In the past we used the Microchip USB stack, but it’s not distributable so we can’t release the full source code. Sure, it’s easy enough to download the code from Microchip directly, but that is an extra […]
Partlist Wednesday: Clock sources
Every Wednesday we highlight a component from the updated Dangerous Prototypes partlist. This week: clock sources. As always, there are footprints for all these parts and more in our public domain Cadsoft Eagle part library. In our workshop the first rule of crystal selection is ‘use a surface mount HC-49/US package if it will fit’. […]
PCB Fab process links
Two sites about different PCB manufacturing processes: Base2’s tour of Advanced Circuits (We think this is who Adafruit uses) Printed circuit prototyping at thinktink.com (DIY and industrial manufacturing) Via the contact form.
Testers needed: IR Toy firmware v20 test 10
IR Toy firmware v20 is nearly ready for release. This version uses the new open source USB stack written by JTR and Honken. The transmit, and receive functions have been completely reworked. The transmitter can handle 1000s of bytes of test signals without a glitch thanks to the new USB double-buffer. There’s only one bug […]
Report: Cloud Flare service issues
Damon Billian writes: Sorry about the service issues today in Amsterdam. A full explanation from our CEO is below: We had problems in our Amsterdam datacenter last night which lead to a period of time where traffic through that datacenter was resulting in 502 errors. These error pages were white and displayed a “cloudflare-nginx” footer. […]
Chronoduino Arduino watch gets a homepage
orcinus documented the Chronoduino: It’s a wiki with all the relevant info and data concerning Chronoduino, including the EAGLE files and all the datasheets. The software section is still missing, but (current) hardware should be all there. I’ve also finished revision 0.3 of the main board, containing a bunch of power supply changes, and sent […]
From the mail bag: Which developers get free PCBs?
George writes: I’m of the understanding that you give away free PCBs to “dedicated developers”. I was curious how you determined what a dedicated developer was, as opposed to somebody that was just trying to get one from you to build. If you could let me know, I would appreciate it. A dedicated developer is […]
European TV B Gone firmware for the Infrared Toy
exapod made a TV B Gone firmware for the Infrared Toy using a list of European TV POWER OFF codes. Grab the firmware in the forum: i controlled all the function with the mplab sim and now it works, it turns off the european television. I attached the code. Thanks ian for the suggestion. Now […]
#FreePCB via Twitter to 2 random RTs. Check the new deal
Every Tuesday we give away two coupons for the free PCB drawer via Twitter. This post was announced on Twitter, and in 24 hours we’ll send coupon codes to two random retweeters. What do you think of the selection method? After a lot of feedback we decided to try random selection to give more people […]
Sparkfun and Pololu 5V boost circuits
A product comparison from the forum: I recently compared two similar 3V -> 5V boost circuits, the Sparkfun #08999 5V out @ 100 mA (based on NCP1400) and the Pololu #798 5V out @ 200 mA (based on NCP1402). The details are below, but the executive summary is: the Pololu 5V boost circuit module has […]
Followup: chipKIT network shield price, source, and more
Gene Apperson from Digilent gave us more background on the chipKIT network and I/O shields: Price of the Basic I/O Shield: I was surprised at how high our cost was on this board. I had originally thought we would be able to sell it for $25, but there is no way we could get enough margin […]
Vintage XT computer IDE controller benchmarks
A followup to the XTIDE build. Pietja successfully tested the CPLD-based version of the IDE hard drive controller for old XT computers. Check out these benchmarks, with and without a speed mod: Unmodified: Write Speed : 213,99 KB/s Read Speed : 248,67 KB/s 8K random, 70% read : 21,20 IOPS Sector random read : 60,37 […]
Cloud Flare outage hits some regions
For the last hour we’ve been getting reports of 502, 504, and “error loading page” problems across the EU. We deactivated the Cloud Flare global cache system and all sites are back online. Pages might not load as fast without Cloud Flare, we’ll activate it again once they straighten out their issues.
Passive ethernet tap spies on network connection
tempmj built a passive ethernet tap for monitoring and debugging network connections: I basically took 4 Panduit brand modular ethernet jacks and wired between two of them normally, other than the fact that the TX pairs from “Side A” looped through an extra jack and the TX pairs from “Side B” looped through the remaining […]
CPLD development boards back in stock
CPLD development boards are back in stock at Seeed Studio. Get the CoolRunner-II development board for $15 and XC9572XL dev-board for $15.