FTDI released a development board for the Vinculum-II (VNC2) inspired by the Arduino. The Vinculo has an Arduino shield pinout, with an extra row of 10 pins on the digital side. The Vinculo is a dual channel USB Host/Device Controller is targeted at rapid development and prototyping of USB Host/Device interfaces. Vinculo…can be programmed using […]
Category Archives: dev boards
“Schemer” microcontroller
Schemer is a microcontroller dev board that’s programmed via a photo diode and flashes from a computer monitor. Not open source, but a good candidate for a remake. Via Make.
Low cost STM32 evaluation board reveiw
IPenguin bought the $10 STM32 development board that made headlines this summer. Read an extended review, with lots of pictures, in the forum.
Program STM32 with the Bus Pirate
Will Donnelly wrote a script to program the STM32 Discovery board with the Bus Pirate: I wanted to program my new STM32 Discovery boards under Linux, and I had a Bus Pirate, so I just finished writing a SWD programmer for it using the raw 2-wire interface. Get a Bus Pirate v3b for $30, including […]
STM32 cheapie Discovery dev board
ST now has a Discovery evaluation board for the STM32 ARM chip, only $12 at Mouser. Thanks for the tip!
Breadboard power supply roundup
Breadboards are a fast and easy way to prototype a circuit, and just about every hobby electronics biz has a power supply that’s supposed to fit a breadboard. IPenguin compared the designs from Seeed Studio, Adafruit Industries, and SparkFun. What’s features are on your ideal breadboard power supply?
Commodore 64 sound emulation with PIC32MX
A few days ago we asked about open source projects you’ve tailored to suit your own needs. Markus writes: I don’t know if it counts, but my story is this: There is this PIC32MX open hardware board named CUI32 for which I managed to get some SID (Commodore 64 sound chip) emulation code to compile […]
LaunchPad MSP430 development board
Texas Instruments is putting out a $4.30 development platform for the 16bit MSP430 microcontroller. The LaunchPad is aimed at beginners and hobbyists. It accepts several different through-hole chips from the MSP430 value line. We like to use the MSP430 in simple low power designs, but the 4K and 8K size limits on the compiler can […]
Pinguino: a PIC Arduino
Pinguino is an Arduino-like board based on PIC microcontroller. The hardware is based on a PIC 18F2550, which has an integrated USB module. This is the same chip we used in the USB IR Toy. The IDE is built with Python. An integrated preprocessor translates Arduino specific instructions directly to C. It uses SDCC as […]
Protostack v1.4 28pin AVR development board
Daniel Garcia, a friend of Dangerous Prototypes, released version 1.4 of the Protostack development board for ATMEGA8 and ATMEGA128. We really like the Protostack concept: it’s a general purpose development board that incorporates user feedback. It demonstrates the minimum circuit to get a 28pin AVR chip working, and has a large prototyping area to implement […]
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 […]
Arduino contest winners
Hack a Day had a thread discussing why hacking site comments are so harsh. That got us thinking about all the groans we hear about Arduino projects. We asked you to rant pro- or con- Arduino, the winners are after the break. We came to this conclusion: geeks don’t hate Arduino, it’s just another case […]
Why do you hate the Arduino?
That’s assuming you do. We’ve noticed a general malaise towards the Arduino and/or Arduino projects in comments at tech blogs. Arduino is to Hack a Day as Knex guns are to Instructables. What’s the deal? Too many newbies with blinken LEDs? $30 is too much for an AVR with a bootloader? Is it the platform […]
Seeed Studio Rainbowduino Carnival contest
Seeed Studio, the team that handles fulfillment of the Bus Pirate, is celebrating the success of their Rainbowduino LED control platform with a design contest. The Rainbowduino can control any LEDs, but it seems to be designed for the 8×8 LED matrix blocks in the picture. The best projects win hardware and Seeed Studio store […]
$49 FPGA development board
Field programmable gate arrays often separate the professionals from the hobbyists. Development tools are expensive, and the chips are usually in high pin-count BGA surface mount packages. Totti turned us on to a $49 Spartan-3A FPGA development kit from AVNET. It’s got a large Xilinx Spartan FPGA, two types of flash memory, and four capacitive […]