Tomorrow we’ll give away another chipKIT WF 32, chipKIt Motor shield, chipKIT DP 32, and chipKit Cmod! Leave a comment on yesterday’s post with a project idea, and one of these boards could be yours on Thursday.
The chipKIt Motor shield is available for $29.99, chipKIT WF 32 for $69.00, chipKIT DP 32 for $23.99, and chipKit Cmod for $29.00 from Digilent.
Ras B blogged about his chipKIT DP 32 he won in our last week chipKIt giveaway:
Ok I just could not resist, and had to post the Proverbial Led blink Program adapted for the DP32, that has 4 LED’s on the board ( Digital Pins 11 to 14).
Will scroll them from right to left, speed varying on the variable resistor on board( trim pot).
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.
Another chipKIt Motor shield, chipKIT WF 32, chipKIT DP 32, and chipKit Cmod to give away this week. Leave a comment on this post with a project idea, and one of these boards could be yours on Thursday.
The chipKIT WF32 is based on the popular Arduino™ open-source hardware prototyping platform and adds the performance of the Microchip PIC32 microcontroller.
The WF32 is the first board from Digilent to have a WiFi MRF24 and SD card on the board both with dedicated signals.
The chipKIt Motor shield is available for $29.99, chipKIT WF 32 for $69.00, chipKIT DP 32 for $23.99, and chipKit Cmod for $29.00 from Digilent. Continue reading “GIVEAWAY: Another chipKIt Motor shield, chipKIT WF 32, chipKIT DP 32, and chipKit Cmod”
Baoshi writes:
I bought some FT230X (FT230XS) USB-USART bridge chip recently for a new design. FT230X is not only cheaper than the traditional FT232RL, but also offers a new fancy “USB charger detection” function. This interests me because I’m quickly running out of desk space and power socket. I wish the new device to be solely powered by USB and/or battery.
Our friends over at 2600 are offering a discount on tickets to their 2014 conference:
Greetings,
We wanted to make sure you were aware of the next conference in the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It’s our tenth conference and we’re calling it HOPE-X. And we have a very special promotion taking place **this Tuesday** that we want to make sure you knew about.
HOPE-X will be taking place on July 18, 19, and 20, 2014 at the
Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. (And just to be clear, the hotel is no longer on the chopping block. Instead, it’s going to be renovated over the next few years. That’s right, we actually won, thanks to your support.)Preregistration will begin in January. BUT for those of you who have played a part in the previous conference, we thought you might like to know about our special half-price ticket sale taking place on 11/12/13 (Tuesday, November 12, 2013) at 2:00 pm Eastern Standard Time. We’re only offering 100 tickets at this price with a maximum of four tickets per order. The last time we did this, we sold out in under two minutes, so get your typing fingers ready and make sure your clock is accurate!
Our website has two addresses: the super-cool HOPE X address located at xxx.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx and for those who find that difficult to remember or for whom the .xxx domain is blocked, x.hope.net.
We look forward to seeing you at HOPE-X – our tenth conference and our twentieth anniversary!
John Boxall over at Tronixstuff posted a step by step guide on building a LED cube spectrum analyzer:
A few weeks ago I was asked about creating a musical-effect display with an RGB LED cube kit from our friends over at Freetronics, and with a little work this was certainly possible using the MSGEQ7 spectrum analyzer IC. In this project we’ll create a small add-on PCB containing the spectrum analyzer circuit and show how it can drive the RGB LED cube kit.
Kevtris tears down the Tektronix PS2521G power supply. He produced this post detailing his findings.:
Weellll, I needed a good bench power supply, so I finally broke down and bought one. I got a Tektronix PS2521G. This doodad has three isolated outputs. This means that each of the three outputs can be wired in series or parallel with the others, and can float above ground or the other supplies. There’s two identical 0-20V at 0-2.5A outputs and a single 0-6V at 0-5A. Giving this supply a total of 130W it can output if all the outputs are going full bore.
Users of the Neurosky EEG brainwave sensor devices will be glad to learn that there’s an Arduino library for reading data. “Brain is an Arduino Library for parsing data from Neurosky-based EEG headsets. Tested units include the Star Wars Force Trainer and Mattel MindFlex.
It’s designed to make it simple to send out an ASCII string of comma-separated values over serial, or to access processed brain wave information directly in your Arduino sketch. See the examples for code demonstrating each use case.”
Instructions for the hardware-end of this hack are available from FrontierNerds. The library code is posted on GitHub.
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 PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. Our PCBs are made through Seeed Studio’s Fusion board service.
This week two random commenters will get a coupon code for the free PCB drawer tomorrow morning. Pick your own PCB.
You get unlimited free PCBs now – finish one and we’ll send you another!
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times every week:
We previously posted about the GNURadio based scanner for SmartNet II digital radio systems. Now Luke Berndt has updated his project info and has posted samples of the decoded system audio online.
It has taken a lot of futzing, but I have my HackRF recording the Washington DC’s Fire Dept radio system and making it playable on the web.
The website to listen to it is at Openmhz, and a writeup on it is here.
The DC Fire system is a SmartNet II trunking system that has digital voice channels. The recording part of my system is a C++ program that uses GnuRadio to capture and decode the trunking control channel and then creates recorders to capture radio calls. The digital audio is then decoded using DSD and uploaded to my website.All of the code is up on GitHub, including the code for the website. Hopefully the code is useful to others!
The channels are spread out over 5MHz, so it is great that the HackRF can easily cover it.
The crew from AnalysIR has added support for the USB IR Toy to their software. AnalysIR is Windows based IR Analyzer & Decoder software for use with Arduino, Raspberry Pi & similar platforms. Check out their blog for more information.
You can your own USB IR Toy v2 for around $20 from Seeedstudio.
Via the contact form.
KORUZA, the open-source open-hardware wireless communication system by Luka Mustafa – Musti
KORUZA is an innovative open-source open-hardware wireless communication system, employing a new low-cost approach to designing free-space optical network systems, enabling building-to-building connectivity with a highly collimated light beam at a capacity of 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) at distances up to 100 m.
It is designed to be suitable for home as well as professional users, enabling organic bottom-up growth of networks by eliminating the need for wired fiber connections and associated high installation costs. The simplicity of use, low-cost and compact size allow the system to be deployed in any network.
Every Friday we give away some extra PCBs via Facebook. This post was announced on Facebook, and on Monday we’ll send coupon codes to two random commenters. More PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday and the blog every Sunday.
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times every week:
Continue reading “Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters”
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon.
Coming up:
Limpkin writes: “In this article, I’ll present you ‘the beast’: a cortex M4-based platform that has plenty of communication interfaces and to which you can connect a lot of different peripherals.”
Visit Limpkin’s page for project details.
This weekend, people in at least 16 cities around the world will take part in hackathons in memory of Aaron Swartz, the free software developer, writer, and activist. Aaron took his own life earlier this year after nearly two years of unjust prosecution under the United States’ Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
People taking part in the hackathons will work on projects that Aaron started, contributed to, or that continue in the spirit of his activism. Most of these projects focus on public transparency or personal privacy in the service of free speech. Many of the events are aimed at both technical and nontechnical participants.
For more information and hackathon locations, visit AaronSwartzHackathon.
Bearmos writes, “Looks like more good things are going to be coming to KiCAD, thanks to the folks at CERN. It sounds like they’re committing a programmer full time for one year to the project.”
One of the main issues the open hardware community must overcome to reach a maturity level akin to that of open-source is the lack of state-of-the-art free/open EDA (electronic design automation) tools. Being aware of this, CERN’s Hardware and Timing team is actively working on bringing a new generation of free/open PCB design tools to the masses. (See also A Guide to Low-Cost PCB Tools.)
Via EETimes.
Nick Johnson over at Arachnid Labs wants to giveaway a few decks of circuit patterns trading cards. Each card has a schematic and short description of a common circuit pattern in electronics. Topics covered include digital, analog, and power electronics.
He’ll give these away to 3 random commenters, just leave a comment on this post with a circuit pattern you’d like to see explained on a card and win a deck!
For more information visit the project’s site -Arachnid Labs. It’s also up on Tindie.
If you want to carry around a portable oscilloscope device at all times then check out this cool geek watch, the Oscilloscope Watch by Gabriel Anzziani of Gabotronics:
The Oscilloscope Watch has all the features of a modern watch (time, calendar, alarm, etc…) combined with all the features of the popular Xprotolab (Oscilloscope, Waveform Generator, Logic Analyzer, Protocol Sniffer, Frequency Counter).
Check out the Oscilloscope Watch Kickstarter here.
