Today there are a number of wearable fitness monitoring products with the Fitbit family among the more popular choices. While Fitbit has made an API available for developers to interact with Fitbit data in their own applications, products and services, the product is not open source. There is an open source alternative API developed by […]
Category Archives: open source
How to choose an open source hardware license
Makers in the open source hardware community are usually more preoccupied with tech details, with licensing considerations being an afterthought. This can lead to unintended consequences resulting from releasing a design under what proves to be either too permissive or restrictive. Simone Cicero tries to clear up confusion over characteristics and implications of the various […]
Poppy, an open-source humanoid robot
Poppy project open source robot debuts from France: Poppy is an Open-source humanoid platform based on robust, flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. Designed by the Flowers Lab at Inria Bordeaux and Ensta ParisTech (France), its development aims at providing an affordable and hackable humanoid robot for science, education, art and geeks. Poppy was initially made […]
emonTH – Wireless temperature and humidity monitoring node
Glyn Hudson over at OpenEnergyMonitor has developed this remote temperature and humidity monitoring node, the emonTH: The emonTH supports both the DHT22 (humidity and temperature) and DS18B20 either onboard or remote temperature sensor. The default software will search for the presence of either sensor at startup. If both sensors are found it will return humidity from the DHT22 […]
Receiving, decoding and decrypting GSM with RTL-SDR
Domi007 has been experimenting with using the RTL-SDR dongle to receive and analyze GSM signals for research and academic purposes. He has posted a four parttutorial explaining his use of GNU Radio companion, Wireshark and other open source software to receive and analyze and decode GSM packets. The above link is for part one of […]
VT100 BeagleBone Mod
Brendan Powers writes, “I’ve recently finished my DEC VT100 BeagleBone mod project. You can find the details, including schematic and board files here.” He’s designed an STP add-on board for the VT100 series terminals that allows the use of an internal BeageBone instead of an external serial connected computer. Via the contact form .
LMD18245 base Microstep motor driver
In this video Dilshan Jayakody demonstrates his open hardware project the LMD18245 micro-step stepper motor driver: This article describe the LMD18245 and PIC16F877A base 16 step bipolar stepper motor driver which is design to work with 12V 18º bipolar stepper motors. In this design we use pair of LMD18245 DMOS full bridge motor drivers to control 2 phases […]
GNU Radio LiveDVD
A new release of the GNU Radio LiveDVD has been announced. Release 2013-0926 is based on the Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS 64-bit operating system and is a bootable SDR environment suitable for demonstration and experimentation, contained on a read-only medium. This release now includes GNU Radio 3.7.2, gqrx v2.2.0-25, gr-air-modes, gr-iqbal, gr-osmosdr v0.1.0-11, hackrf v2013.07.1-16, osmo-sdr […]
Open Source Nixie clock project
ezflyr shared us his Nixie clock in the project log forum: For anyone that’s interested, here is a picture of my Nixie Clock prototype! I had the hardwood base made out of Maple by a local cabinet shop for $30, and the Acrylic cover was sourced from a company that specializes in display cases for about $15. […]
Open source Halloween LED projects
Eric Thompson of Lowvoltagelabs. sends in these two Open Source Hardware projects for Halloween: I thought October might be a good time to share a couple Halloween related circuit boards that I have designed. Both of them were designed using KiCAD and I have released them as open source hardware so people can make their […]
OpenMV camera module
mux blogged about his open source camera project: This a quick update on my camera project (OpenMV)… I’ve finally received the long overdue PCBs today and assembled one. I haven’t written any code yet, but I’ve managed to get it into DFU mode and upload a blinky, it seems to be working fine so far, no […]
Amateur radio TV beacon inside CCTV case
András Veres-Szentkirályi write about an interesting project The Budapest hackerspace (hsbp.org) did some joint work with a local ham radio club and created an SSTV beacon housed inside a CCTV case that takes an image of its environment and transmits it using slow-scan television over ham bands. There’s currently one experimental device installed, and since […]
Bluetooth shield for Arduino
Boris Landoni from Open Electronics writes about a new open source bluetooth shield for Arduino: Here’s an application to control the brightness of an RGB LED strip wirelessly (via Bluetooth) using a smartphone. The whole project is presented in a dedicated Bluetooth shield for Arduino and a RGB shield.
USB random number generator
Dilshan Jayakody has written an article detailing his open hardware project the USB random number generator: This project is about USB port base true hardware random number generator and it is design around the avalanche noise which occurred in reversed biased P-N junction. This random number generator is design using commonly available electronic components. The core component […]
ProfTweak app tweaks Makerware settings
Rich Olson of Nothing Labs writes: I’m a Makerbot Replicator 2 user – and I generally like MakerWare – but it pains me that they don’t expose about 95% of the slicer settings in the GUI. To get good results with filaments besides PLA – I often need to do things not in MakerWare’s interface […]
M-Stack open source USB stack for PIC microcontrollers
Here is an open source USB stack for PIC microcontrollers and DSPs. It features a dual LGPL and Apache licenses making it suitable for commercial open source projects. So far it only supports the HID device class. A USB device stack is the software necessary to drive the USB device peripheral hardware on a microcontroller […]
GNURadio based scanner for SmartNet II digital radio systems
Luke Berndt posted on the HackRF-dev forum: “I built a Scanner app so I could use my HackRF to listen to my local fire department. It should work for any Moto SmartNet trunking systems that uses P25 CAI for the voice channels. It is based off the gr-smartnet code and uses DSD to decode the […]
New Energia version available
The Energia team announces the availability of version 0101E0010. Energia is an open-source electronics prototyping platform started by Robert Wessels in January of 2012 with the goal to bring the Wiring and Arduino framework to the Texas Instruments MSP430 based LaunchPad. Energia uses the mspgcc compiler by Peter Bigot and is based on the Wiring […]
Arduino programmable light dimmer
Telford Dorr posted this project in time for Halloween, to flicker your porch lights like a lantern in a strong wind. It’s a table driven Arduino based programmable dimmer. Visit Telford’s website for source code and project details. Via the contact form.
Codebender web-based Arduino coding tool
Codebender is a web-based programming tool for Arduino. ” Traditionally, you would need to install an IDE, which includes all the necessary software, find and install the correct drivers, set permissions, etc. It can take 10-60 minutes. Or it can be a total mess. With Codebender, you can program your Arduino straight from your browser. […]