Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 14 he came up with Hello-ot:
Being able to change between, black (off), red, green and yellow (quickly alternating red/green) my plan was to make an Reversi/Othello game with them and have it all fit on a 10×10 cm pcb.
For selecting which tile to add I added one horizontal and one vertical row of tactile buttons so the player could press the buttons corresponding to the row and column that he wanted to play.
0.65mm pitch xQFP breakout boards are back in stock at Seeed Studio. These boards make your QFP prototyping faster and easier. They’re available in 0.50mm, 0.65mm, and 0.80mm pin pitch for just $3.
With TI wireless devices being encountered from time to time in your hardware hacking it’s important to be able to recognize the types of chips and their associated capabilities. TI has a free Wireless Connectivity Guide available covering their offerings for various wireless technologies including mesh and IP networks, personal area networks, locationing, RF sub-1 GHz, RF 2.4 GHz and RFID.
Download the free 74 page PDF from TI.
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:
The GNU Radio team has announced the release of version 3.7.
“This is a major new release of GNU Radio, culminating a year and a half of side-by-side development with the new features added to the GNU Radio 3.6 API. With the significant restructuring that was occurring as part of the 3.7 development, at times this seemed like rebuilding a race car engine while still driving it.
The GNU Radio SDR framework/runtime gained many new capabilities in 3.6, and our project focus now during the 3.7 development series will be to use these new capabilities to improve GNU Radio DSP block libraries and example applications.”
For project info or downloads visit the GNU Radio project main page, and visit here for documentation on the C++ API.
If you were fortunate enough to score one of the HackRF Jawbreaker SDR boards from Michael Ossmann, you may have noticed the board has an SMA antenna connector as well as a built-in PCB antenna (intended for operation near 900 MHz). Ossmann recommends that you disable the on-board PCB antenna if you intend to use the board with an external antenna.
In this short video, HackRF co-developer Jared Boone demonstrates how to carefully make the necessary mod to the board, which entails carefully removing R44 and cutting the underlying trace.
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:
Mats posted an update on his Sniff-A-Lot for Bus Pirate:
So, I found my Bus Pirate and then made a RS-232 breakout cable with a male/female DB9 and tapped off rx/tx from pin 2/3 and gnd from pin 5. And hooked it up to the first serial device I had in reach – a magstrip card reader/writer (cloning credit cards much? ^_^)
The reader/writer was working even after I plugged in the tap cable and I was able to see both the data sent from the computer and the replies from the unit on the Bus Pirate terminal window. Success!
So the with this unit the Bus Pirate is able to read data from a real high-voltage RS232 serial port, and this on both the tx and the rx lines.
ptyper draws our attention to a deal from TigerDirect which promises to deliver a new HEC 350W Power Supply at no cost after coupon and rebate. The deal says it runs until July 31, 2013. (While the initial advertisement says “free shipping today”, that appears to have expired as we were charged “postage and handling”.) Still, that means a new desktop computer PS for around $8. Check it out!
Via the contact form.
UV resin based mUVe 3D Printer releases source files:
The mUVe 1 3D Printer, an open UV resin based 3D printer was successfully funded on indiegogo back in April. As estimated, the first Ultimate kit was shipped out on Jun.20. Last weekend the team has completed building and shipping all of the Ultimate kits. Meanwhile Dean Piper, the maker behind the mUVe 1 3D Printer project, has shared all of the source material on their website
TechBitar wrote this Instructable detailing his ANDRUINO, the 2-way Android controller for Arduino via bluetooth:
ANDRUINO is a simple tool to help you control your Arduino (or clone) from your Android phone. It’s both an Android app and an Arduino program. Andruino has a simple Android user interface to 1) control Arduino’s digital and PWM pins 2) send text commands to Arduino 3) and receive data from Arduino over Bluetooth using the ever popular HC-05 Bluetooth over serial module or its siblings.
Andruino should work with other Bluetooth modules with some tweaking but I have only tested it with the HC-05. This is an alpha version that’s running fine on my Samsung Galaxy S2 Plus. Please share your experience running Andruino on your phone.
Via the contact form.
Check out the video after the break.
Continue reading “Andruino: A simple 2-way bluetooth-based Android controller for Arduino”
Drone refers us to this short video from NXP on very small pitch parts (0.35mm) and the challenges in mounting them. NXP debuts their new Diamond package which they report is over 25 percent smaller than their XSON package (suffix GN), previously the world’s smallest package. The video point out that this design retains the traditional 0.5mm pad pitch which allows simplified PCB assembly.
Via the contact form.
John Boxall over at Tronixstuff has a series of Arduino tutorials. This chapter fifty-three of a series will show you how to use the TI ADS1110 16-bit ADC with Arduino:
Moving on from the last chapter where we explained an 8-bit ADC, in this instalment we have the Texas Instruments ADS1110 – an incredibly tiny but useful 16-bit analogue-to-digital converter IC. It can operate between 2.7 and 5.5 V so it’s also fine for Arduino Due and other lower-voltage development boards. This is a quick guide to get you going with the ADS1110 ready for further applications.
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 13 he came up with Sniff-A-Lot, a small addon board to the Bus Pirate:
As PAW13 I did a small addon board to the Bus Pirate. Sniff-A-Lot combines both TX and RX of a serial port into one signal that can be monitored by the Bus Pirate.
This works as long as RX and TX is not transmitting simultaneous (Full Duplex). In most cases the communication is only Half Duplex. where the computer sends a command to the device and the device replies and this gets repeated.
The Sniff-A-Lot handles a both a real RS-232 +/- 12volt communication as well as TTL-level serial comms – both with Idle High and Idle Low versions.
Here’s a video by Dilshan Jayakody demonstrating the USB custom hardware interface for Unity3D:
The custom hardware unit used in this demo is build around Microchip’s PIC18F2550 MCU. This custom USB controller consists with 4 push buttons and linear potentiometer. In supplied demo user needs to control aircraft with those buttons and potentiometer. According to the game logic 4 buttons are used to control the flying direction and flying angle of the aircraft and potentiometer is used to control the speed of the aircraft.
In an effort to better proportion the heating system in his house, Mike Stirling decided to use Conrad FHT8V wireless thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs) to control heat distribution in zones. He decided to analyze the valve’s 868 MHz control signals using his RTL-SDR dongle and GNU Radio. After discovering that the protocol uses simple on-off keying (OOK), he went on to write a custom GNU Radio block to decode the packets. With this knowledge, Mike will be able to progress further toward his design of a custom home heating control system.
His efforts are a good illustration of why and how to write your own custom block in GNU Radio.
For additional details and code downloads, visit Mike’s Lab Notes website.
Here’s a video by Thebishopgame describing how his Guitarduino works, an Arduino/MaxMSP guitar mounted midi control system:
There are 6 arcade buttons on the bridge, three force sensitive resistor squares on the body, and a long FSR strip on the back of the neck. The arduino just takes sensor readings and spits them out the serial port as ASCII, which I take into MaxMSP and assign midi values. The buttons and body FSRs all either generate midi notes or control values and the neck strip function as an “alt” key so I can two different function out of the same button. The midi then goes either into Ableton Live (looper control, drums) or into my AxeFX II (guitar FX), which is also generating the guitar tone. To get that sound, I’m mixing the guitar signal with the AxeFX’s synth block and then slamming that into a drive block and an amp.
Kerry Wong shows off his VFD clock he built after he completed the filament driver and the circuit to drive the multiplexed VFD segments we cover previously:
After I completed the filament driver and the circuit to drive the multiplexed VFD segments, it is time to finish the VFD clock project I had in mind earlier.
On the circuit side, there isn’t too much to it. All I needed was a realtime clock and a microcontroller to interface with the RTC and the VFD driving circuit I discussed before. The RTC chip I used is a high accuracy DS3232 from Maxim. A more popular RTC chip such as DS1307 can also be used here without too much programming change. The microcontroller I used is an Arduino bootloaded ATmega328P. Since the VFD driver circuitry requires a higher DC voltage (e.g. 27V, a few milliamps) for the anode plates and gates but the TTL circuit only needs 5V, the power supply must be able to provide both required voltages.
Check out the video after the break.
Here’s an Instructable by GYRO: Becks beer bottle with an audio recording scratched on it
We ground a high-speed steel cutting tool which we polished to mirror finish resulting in a very quiet cut, all this taking place under a microscope!
We also have a couple of sapphire tips which we used for some test cuts but we found the steel one are quieter but with a much shorter life, in fact any contaminants in the coating would take a microscopic chunk out of the tip effectively destroying it!
Heating the tip by winding hair-thin NiChrome wire and passing a current through it resulted in a smoother cut, requiring less downforce and reduced surface noise as it helps it glide through the surface without tearing the substrate.
Via Hacked Gadgets.
Check out the video after the break.
Continue reading “Becks beer bottle with an audio recording scratched on it”
