Raj over at Embedded Lab has just finished a new Pulse Meter project based on chipKIT Uno32 and Easy Pulse sensor:
This is a third project in our chipKIT tutorial series and today we are going to construct a simple pulse rate meter using our Easy Pulse sensor with Digilent’s chipKIT Uno32 board. Digilent’s chipKIT Basic I/O shield is also used in this project for displaying the pulse waveform and the pulse rate.
It’s been awhile since we’ve covered the FUNcube dongle, but their updated extended frequency coverage hardware and new software dashboard merits a new look. The FUNcube Dongle is an SDR device covering the 150kHz to 1.9GHz frequency range (with a gap in coverage between 240 MHz and 420 MHz). It retails online for around GBP125, and works with Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.
The FUNcube project is a result of the efforts of Howard Long, holder of amateur radio callsign G6LVB, along with several other team members. FUNcube receivers are designed for use in receiving the FUNcube educational satellites, which will contain a materials science experiment, from which school students can receive telemetry data which they can compare to the results they obtained from similar reference experiments in the classroom. The recently released FUNcube-1 is a complete educational single CubeSat project with the goal of enthusing and educating young people about radio, space, physics and electronics. It operates on a downlink frequency of 145.935 MHz using BPSK modulation.
“The FUNcube-1 Dashboard user interface enables the display of telemetry, debug data and Fitter messages from the FUNcube-1 (FC1) spacecraft. It can also upload the received data to the FUNcube Data Warehouse over the internet. The Dashboard can accept live inputs from a directly connected FUNcube Dongle (both Pro and Pro+models) or by audio from another SSB radio fed into the computer soundcard. It can also display previously recorded data from IQ “WAV” files or from the “.funcubebin” recordings that it can create during operation.” The Dashboard software is available for Windows, and a complete description of its usage can be found in the 24-page PDF Release Notes doc.
From this description, it would appear that the Dashboard could also be used with files generated by the RTL-SDR Dongle or HackRF board.
63 resistor reels just arrived for a test 0603 OOMP part book. Books and sheets should be here tomorrow. We’ll stuff some samples and get an idea of the time involved this weekend if everything goes smoothly.
Shenzhen isn’t just about building electronic hardware, so many things can be created and customized inexpensively. One day we spotted an entire street of shops selling customized signs in Dongmen, the old market neighborhood. There’s a few dozen shops with hundreds of sample signs in different styles hung on the walls, most decorated with binky lights.
Immediately it became imperative to have the Dangerous Prototypes logo make into a sign. Prices are quite reasonable. At first we wanted an 80cm by 90cm sign: quotes ranged from 1800 to 4000RMB ($300 to $660). Then we realized that’s too massive for an inside wall and ordered a 60cm by 70cm sign. The price dropped down to 800 to 2000RMB ($120 to $330).
We looked over the sample signs to get an idea what would work for the logo. There’s lots of fine details in the circuit board of the triangle outline so a molded plastic sign wouldn’t work. We decided to go for laser cut metal on a yellow background.
They gave us swatches with 100 different material samples to choose from – plastics for the background and metals for the logo. We also had the options of two-sided sign, backlit sign, and color changing lights. The default metal is reflective and might be distracting in a workshop video, so we had the shop hand-brush the metal for a nice vintage look which added to the cost. They thought the “DANGEROUS” font in the logo was too thin to cut and flipped through 100s of fonts to find something that matched.
1400RMB ($220), and four days later, the sign was ready. They tested it for us at the shop. All the details in the logo are perfect and the color is beautiful.
Four screws secure the front of the sign to the back. Mounting involves separating the parts, screwing it to a wall, and replacing the front. It’s powered by an external 12volt transformer. The inside is plastered with dozens of white LED strips that give an even glow.
Overall the sign making experience was easy and fun. Look for the big yellow sign in future workshop videos.
The sign street is named Lixin Road, outside of the Rainbow Square Shopping Mall in Dongmen.
XC9572XL CPLD development board are back in stock at Seeed Studio. CPLDs are programmable logic gate arrays which allow you to build custom logic devices simply by programing them.
Get the XC9572XL dev-board for $15 and CoolRunner-II development board for $15.
mux posted an update on his camera project OpenMV, an open-source tiny machine vision module using an STM32F4 ARM Cortex-M4 micro and an OV9650 sensor:
USB Support- The camera now supports USB OTG full speed, I’ve also written a small userspace tool with libusb/SDL to interface with the camera and view the frame buffer, this makes it really easy to debug the image processing code, and it also lets you change the sensor’s registers while watching the results in realtime.
I’ve mentioned building the STM32F4xx libraries in a previous post, you can checkout the repo linked there if you want to build the libraries.Face Detection-Many were very interested in this feature, well I’ve managed to get the viola-jones face detector working on the camera, and it’s working fine…
DSD is a popular software tool for decoding various unencrypted digital radio protocols about which we’ve previously posted. We noticed that there is now a release of DSD which purports to be capable of decoding the amateur radio digital protocol known as D-Star. This is in addition to P25, X2-TDMA, ProVoice and NXDN offered in previous releases.
According to the author’s, “DSD should easily compile on any Linux or *BSD system with gcc. There are some debugging/development options in config.h that normal users will want to leave disabled as they can severely impact performance. DSD is able to decode several digital voice formats from discriminator tap audio and synthesize the decoded speech. Speech synthesis requires mbelib, which is a separate package.”
More information and code downloads can be found on the DSD GitHub page.
Richard Harris has produced a series of video tutorials on how to build a low cost micro CNC machine that uses old floppy drives for the movement.
The video above is 10 in the series, if you would like to build you own you will need to start from video 1 which is here. It won’t do anything big, but what do you want for a machine built from parts that would normally be tossed out?
Via Hacked Gadgets.
Parker Dillmann of Longhorn Engineer is working on a 8 channel K-type thermocouple temperature logger, the OctoPROBER:
This has been an idea I have been kicking around for awhile. The OctoPROBER is a 8 channel, K-type thermocouple temperature logger. It has a micro SD card slot for logging data remotely. The USB connection can send log data directly to the PC.
Power is supplied via internal lithium 18650 3.7V cell and is charged over USB. The BQ24075RGTT is used to manage the charging of the lithium battery by using the outputs of the FT230X USB chip. I will cover this in more detail when I can verify my idea will work.
Baoshi writes:
For the holiday season I get myself an AVR JTAGICE3. Holding the new shiny emulator and a bunch of Arduino boards, what shall I do? Of course to hop onto the all-hail Atmel Studio and ditch the toy-alike Arduino software. Reason being? Debugging Arduino code with serial console is no fun. I need my single steps, breakpoints and watches back. In fact the Arduino boards seems to be more valuable (to me) without the software. The onboard ISP connector seems to be standard and it “just works” with JTAGICE3. Well, I had this “just works” impression until I tried it on the new Arduino Micro board…
The DP6037 Protoboard v1 PCB is back in stock at Seeed Studio. A multipurpose 0.1″ pitch prototyping board that fits a DP6037 acrylic case.
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.
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:
Some stuff:
We try to stagger free PCB posts so every time zone has a chance to participate, but the best way to see it first is to subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.
Miceuz blogged about his DIY driver for EQ2 equatorial mount motor:
We wanted to give a telescope as a Christmas present to one kid. Luckily enough we have happened to find one standing under the autumn rain in a second hand junk yard in Berlin. The telescope itself was dusty and wet, but the mount was in a good shape, just the driver electronics for the motor were missing.
After some poking and googling I was able to determine that the mount uses a bipolar stepper motor to compensate for Earth’s rotation. How do you drive a bipolar stepper? Well, you just hook up a couple of H-bridges and let the microcontroller switch them.I didn’t have enought time to order parts, design and etch the PCB, etc, so I decided to use whatever I had around. The code and schematics are available on my github repo if someone wants to reproduce this or just to poke around.
@Badger32d tweeted, “Recovering this e3000 with my Bus Pirate.”
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Our friends from 2600 write informing us of the kickoff of preregistration for their HOPE X conference.
We’ll be offering tickets for sale at a discounted rate from the door price. The direct link to the ordering form is http://store.2600.com/hopextickets.html. Tickets will be emailed to you later this month. That also applies if you’ve participated in any of
our previous HOPE X ticket promotions.While we have a bigger quantity of tickets available than in the past, it’s always a good idea to grab them as early as possible, since things could change. Hacker conferences around the world have been getting far
more attendees than in the past, so it’s quite possible we’ll have to put some limits in place. Your tickets are fully transferable to others, so if you’re unable to attend, it’s a simple matter to give or sell
your tickets to someone else. (We can help you with this process, but we absolutely won’t help anyone scalp tickets.)Further details on the conference will be posted at our official website
which is http://x.hope.net or http://xxx.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx. Speaker
submissions will be opening up shortly and you’ll have the opportunity to get involved in the shaping of what we expect to be a truly historic conference.HOPE X will be taking place from July 18th to July 20th, 2014.
We hope to see you there!
Kevin Rye writes:
With version 3 of my Bare Bones Arduino boards off being fabbed, as well as the laser-cut acrylic, it was time to go ahead a design my first shield.
I have a ton of 7-segment displays that I’ve sourced over the years from various tear-downs of stuff from the garbage. I’ve been meaning to make something with them for years.
I have a DS18B20 temperature sensor that I’ve been meaning to make use of too. It almost made it into my GPS clock, but I ended up just using the temperature from the DS3231 RTC chip.
I figured it would be cool to just make something simple with it. I decided that I could easily make a shield for the BBA3 with 2 x 7-segment displays and I could pop it on my desk as a cheap little digital thermometer. It’s a one-trick pony, but at least I get to use up a few of those displays. Not to mention, the PCBs will only cost $3.70 a piece.
I got to work on a prototype. I connected a few 7-segment displays together and wired them to my Arduino.
Bus Blaster v4 JTAG debugger is back in stock at Seeed Studio.The cool thing about the Bus Blaster is that it uses a programmable logic chip as a buffer. It can imitate different types of programming hardware with a simple USB update.
You can get a Bus Blaster v4 for $45.
In this video Trandi demonstrates his little self-balancing robot project:
It’s really been a very long time since I added this on my todo list, and in the past couple of week-ends I finally found the time to do it.
And for once, I managed to avoid over-designing it, and produce something that actually works and is fun to play with, even though it lacks features… the proof is that my 2years old son did enjoy playing with it for several minutes!
Herpderp posted his smart display project in the forum:
Even if it is not completed yet, I think that the current version of PCB/software is now “acceptable”. I’m currently working on a kind of documentation / user manual, I hope to finish it quickly…
So here is a small video of the smart TFT
And source code / eagle files on github
I’m still planning to sell some boards on tindie ($35, including a 2GB µSD card)
Via the forum.
Stephen A. Ridley gave this presentation at the recently concluded Chaos Communications Conference (30C3) in Hamburg, Germany. He outlines his recent research into practical ARM exploitation on Linux and Android (for embedded applications and mobile devices). He demonstrates these techniques and discusses how they were discovered using several custom built ARM hardware development platforms.
He also discusses related hardware research including bus protocol eavesdropping/reverse engineering, demystifying hardware debugging, and surreptitiously obtaining embedded software (firmware) using hardware techniques.
Stephen is co-author of the soon-to-be-released “Android Hackers Handbook”.
