Bus Pirate makes life easier

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M2M writes:

First off, you guys Rock! I have had so much productive fun with BP and I just got it a few days ago. Here is a little thing I did to make a project weigh less.
When you are prototyping GPS M2M you don’t always want to carry your laptop outside to get a signal. My boss discovered me pushing a cart loaded with my laptop/protoboard/GPS and BP rolling around the parking lot yesterday.
Looking around my cubical I realized that I had an OTG cable lying around. I grabbed my smart phone and after a quick download I was able to loose the cart and laptop completely.

Thanks M2M! Via the forum.

Get an assembled Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.

PCB a Week 18: SMD Practice Skull

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Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week.  In week 18  he came up with SMD Practice Skull:

I while ago I chatted with (Re:load) Nick Johnson about making some simple pcbs for learning how to solder smd parts. This is one of the boards that I came up with.
All parts are 1206 except for the transistors that are SOT23 so it should be rather easy to solder this even with a rather coarse tip on the soldering iron. I haven’t tested for how long the battery actually will last, but it will probably flash for a couple of days.

App note: Using the XMEGA external bus interface

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Here’s an application note from Atmel describing how to use the external bus interface fount on the XMEGA series AVR microcontrollers.

The XMEGA External Bus Interface (EBI) is a highly flexible module for interfacing external memories and memory addressable peripherals such as LCD controllers and advanced communication controllers. The EBI module has four separate Chip Select blocks with individual address ranges and wait state control. Additional Chip Select lines can be decoded externally.

Free PCB Sunday: Pick your PCB

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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:

Continue reading “Free PCB Sunday: Pick your PCB”

Avalanche pulse generator, and some scope porn.

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By now we are all sure you know about Jim Williams’ avalanche pulse generator from his famous application note 47 we even posted about Kerry Wong’s pulse generator using jellybean transistors. And we can’t forget The EEVblog covering a build sent to him. Today we will be exploring our build, that is not quite like the others. Continue reading “Avalanche pulse generator, and some scope porn.”

App note: Using the CLC module to implement a PCM IR driver

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Here is an application note from Microchip describing how to implement pulse code modulation infrared remote control.

This technical brief shows how to construct a simple, low-power IR (infrared) remote control transmitter using a PIC16F1708 microcontroller. The remote control transmitter makes use of the Configurable Logic Cell (CLC) and Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) to create a Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) signal that will be transmitted via an infrared LED. The Peripheral Pin Select (PPS) feature is used to route the PCM signal to an infrared LED.

RDS reception using RTL-SDR dongle

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If you have a RTL-SDR dongle and Windows machine you might want to try out this simple project. It’s a proof of concept using an Ubuntu machine with GNU Radio Companion to obtain the RDS signal from the FM broadcast. Then the data is sent over TCP to a Windows 7 machine, running a .NET program which decodes and displays the RDS data.

The software required is the free and open source GNU Radio program and the closed source Visual Studio 2010 (which is available for download without charge from Microsoft.)

Visit the blog at AnotherUrl for project details and code downloads.

Yet another Logic Sniffer case

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Adam posted pictures of a case he designed for the Logic Sniffer:

I am in the process of designing up a case for my logic sniffer. I have designed it for use with just the standard 16 channels of input. It has captured reset and update buttons as well as labeling for both buttons and LEDs. The LEDs have an individual hole that blocks out the light from the other LEDs. I personally plan on fitting some small acrylic rod for a light pipe. This is just the first revision. I expect that there might need to be some fiddling with getting the buttons correct.

More awesome DIY cases.

Get a Logic Sniffer for $50, with free worldwide shipping.

Quick test of the PS-305D PSU

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Mats did a review of the PS-305D PSU he bought from Smart-Prototyping:

I ran some basic measurements on the PS-305D (Linear 0-30V/0-5A, 1mA Display) I recently bought from Smart-Prototyping.The internal volt meter in the PSU seems reasonably well calibrated.Then I tested the Constant Current capabilities with having a direct short circuit through my DMM. It was very hard to adjust currents below 30mA, but that is expected in short circuit mode.  I connected a 12V led bulb with the PSU set at 12.0 volt output. Now the current could be adjusted reasonably well even below 30mAI then set the PSU to 5 volts and connected it to an oscilloscope to see how it behaved during power-on.

Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters

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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”

Week in (p)review July 19, 2013

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Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon.

Coming up:

  • Free PCBs via Facebook on Friday
  • App notes on the weekend
  • Free PCB Sunday
  • Free PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday
  • Weekly roundup and preview every Friday

PCB a Week 17: USB Spypow

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Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week.  In week 17  he came up with USB Spypow, it displays the actual charge rates of a USB device:

Yesterday I saw the “The Practical Meter” on Kickstarter – a small unit that is placed inline with the USB when charging your phone and shows the actual charging power (in watts) on a row of LEDs.
I wanted to have a go at it as well so I did the following last evening.

TI announces sponsorship of Innovation World Cup challenge

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TI has announced their participation as a sponsor in the Worldwie Innovation Cup competition:

“For the fourth year in a row Texas Instruments have joined the Wearable Technologies Innovation World Cup where developers from all over the world are called to submit their innovative solutions for wearable devices.

New ideas, products and prototypes can be submitted in the following categories: Sports & Fitness, Healthcare & Wellness, Gaming & Lifestyle, Security & Prevention. The Wearable Technologies Innovator of the Year will receive a prize of USD 5,000!

During the competition TI will offer a 50% discount to the first 100 registrants who choose one of the following TI kits: CC2541DK-Mini, CC110L RF BoosterPack, CC1120DK. TI will also offer free SensorTags to the first 100 registrants who decide to design with TI’s award winning tool!”

The database for submissions is open until November 30, 2013.

Visit TI’s Wearable Technologies page for more information and to participate.

[We note from the Innovation World Cup sponsors page that there are also other sponsors offering free or discounted hardware/software to registered participants, including STMicroelectronics and the blukii Development Kit by C.Schneider.]

ReCoMonB – Real Computer Monitoring Block

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Ivan Creations made this ReCoMonB (Real Computer Monitoring Block) and wrote a detailed explanation on his blog describing the build:

I managed to de-virtualize the CPU/MEM/HDD/NET stats and now I have them physically represented on my desk. The device that does that is named ReCoMonB – Real Computer Monitoring Block.
I have also made the device driverless and working on Liunx and Windows.

Via the contact form.

Turning a TP-LINK TL-MR3020 into an audio player

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forbiddenhex has written an article detailing how to turn a TP-LINK TL-MR3020 into an Audio player:

This time i flush the TL-MR3020 with Openwrt. After couple of usb packages and audio packages i just plug in the USB sound card (which was given by whoknowz – to the router.
When the USB sound card is detected from the linux, you can check by command dmesg. Then install the madplay or any player you prefer.
I installed madplay because it play audio streams and play local files.
For test i played the audio stream from atoll radio and it works great. Just ssh the router and pass this command wget -o – http://radioatoll.serverroom.us:7088/ | madplay –

rompar: a tool to analyze masked ROMs

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You may have seen those highly magnified photos of decapped chips displaying the hardware architecture and wondered what information is represented by the solder-like designs.

Adam “Major Malfunction” Laurie of Aperature Labs has developed a software tool to assist in deciphering the bits represented in these highly magnified chip photos. Known as rompar, its a Python tool for semi-automatic extraction of data from microscopic images of masked ROM.

For more photos and project details visit Aperature Labs.

JTAG flashing Proxmark3 using Bus Pirate

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MMN-o from Umea Hackerspace successfully recovered his Proxmark3 using the Bus Pirate:

 Sure, there are cheap, hackable alternatives that connect to the parallell port, but that interface is unfortunately of a pretty bygone era. So given that I did not have access to a true parallell port at the time, I had to keep looking for alternatives. Essentially anything that worked with the flashing and debugging utility OpenOCD would be good, and something I could find nearby would be even better! And the OpenOCD list of  supported interfaces contained among many others the Bus Pirate, a handy open hardware design that helps hackers with serial communication of just about any kind.

Get an assembled Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.