Printer went permanent paper jam. Replaced. Did you know most countries will give you a second passport if you need lots of visas or travel to certain countries? Waited in line at the Consulate.
We’re working on assembling documentation on the Bus Pirate for our Bus Pirate educational kit project. We’re writing it up to be datasheet style.
Make Magazine has a tutorial on the OpenERP enterprise resource planing tool. It’s a project manager for tracking a project from an idea to fulfillment. The tutorial runs through one project example and explains how to setup all the steps along the way.
ERP systems have been around for several decades, but for much of that time they have been shockingly expensive, often in the millions of dollars. Luckily, the open source community has come forward with a number of options that are hacker friendly and scaled for small and medium size businesses. If there was ever a time for automation in a new start up hardware business, this is it.
Fcobcn shared his simple and efficient 12V to 5v converter. It’s based around the TL2575 buck IC, and can output 1 amp of current.
I’m using a TL2575 from ti, wich has a max efficiency of 88%, 1A, works quite well, previously were using a 7805 wich needed heat sinking. There’s apparently no heat coming out from the TL2575 circuit.
I don’t like seeing all this stuff laying around, not being put to good use. So I will donate most of the items if anyone is interested – you would only need to pay for the shipping. I live in Brazil, but can probably ship small quantities in envelopes for about US$ 5-10 to most places.
Depending on the item (if I realize it holds significant value) we may trade it for something else, including money
But I think for the most part, items will go for free if there are people interested.
matthewg42 has released this library for using V3B-K magstripe readers with Arduinos on Gitub. He describes, “This is more or less a wrapper around Stephan King’s code which has been floating around the nets for a while. I fixed a small problem with a potential buffer overflow if someone jiggles a card around while it is being read, or if a card is swiped too fast.”
For more information and sample code see Matthew’s post at Porpoisehead.net.
Lately we’ve been experimenting with pogo pin connectors for programing our boards. Beth designed another DIY ICSP pogo pin connector using two PCBs to align the pogo pins properly. One board holds the pin connections, and the other stabilizes everything for alignment.
In the end I decided to use two pcbs to make the pogo pins more stable and straight, using as you can see in the pictures two pc case screws (I don’t have any kind of spacer over here).I was lucky because I left in the board a series of 3.2mm mounting holes, eventually letting me use this screws to space the boards nicely.
Three times a week we give away free PCBs, and on some weeks other random giveaways as well. When they’re around, we also toss in a few stickers. Systemstech shared his restyling of a Hakko 951 soldering station with a free PCB sticker. Feel free to share yours as well.
A video tutorial on the benefits and pitfalls of using aluminum electrolytic capacitors. Learn how these capacitors degrade, and how their life cycle is proportional to the stresses you put them through.
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:
Here’s a series of video tutorials on filtering from Analog Devices. First in the series (embedded above) covers simple single pole filters made out of resistors and capacitors. The series moves onto active filtering with op-amps, and finishes with multi-pole Sallen-Key filters. Geek alert: theory and math zone!
Thomas Sarlandie writes, “I have hooked up a high power LED driver that I designed and built a few months ago to a 40W led and to a Raspberry Pi. I had to fight the Pi a little to get clean PWMs out of it (without using an Arduino or external PWM generator) and the result is a beautiful new PWM library for the Pi: pi-blaster. You can tell by the size of the LED heatsink that this is a VERY dangerous prototype!”
You can read the complete article and photos of the complete setup at TBIdeas.
Via the contact form.
Texas Instruments goes over regulator output-voltage accuracy, warning that feedback resistor tolerances have a high impact on the output accuracy and should be chosen with care.
If you have an old Nokia phone and want to hack it to send SMS messages, this tutorial by Alex at InsideGadgets should prove interesting. He’s produced a detailed tutorial showing the hardware and code needed to interface a Nokia 6110-series with an Arduino Duemilanove to send SMS messages. The Arduino connects to the phones F-bus connector using a simple three-wire two-resistor interface and transfers packets using the F-bus protocol. Check out Alex’s post for details on this protocol, code and important links.
Via InsideGadgets.
A part presentation from the Electronic City blog describes the SCT2024 16 channel LED driver with programmable current output and a serial control interface.
SCT2024 integrated circuit is a serial-parallel interface for LEDs with the programming and the limiting of the current on outputs in between 5 and 45mA. It makes an ideal option for commanding the displays with common anode with microcontroller. So the led driver is our discussion topic for today.
Today we workshopped a few ideas and concepts for a PIC32 development board using some free parts Microchip offered. In this regard we checked up on the current state of available USB bootloaders for this microcontroller, as well as open source USB stacks.
How to make solder paste stencils out of old soda pop cans. Applying the toner transfer method of etching and you can end up with a usable stencil.
Via Adafruit.
Here’s an SVG image to Eagle polygon importer called svg2poly. It seems like an excellent alternative to the BMP importing plugin we’ve been using to make cool silkscreen artwork for our boards.
Surprisingly often, I find myself wanting to import vector images into eagle, and have them appear as polygons – usually for silkscreen. Whilst importing vectors as lines is practical – although ridiculously awkward – up until now I haven’t found a single practical way to import a vector drawing as polygons.
Via the forum. Thanks Nick!
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:
Here’s a video demonstrating the Pinoccio Web Rover. A mobile phone accelerometer in Brazil is controlling the small robot in Nevada in real time. The Pinoccio is an Arduino compatible Wireless platform. It’s based on the ATMega128rfa1 microcontroller with an 802.15.4 compliant radio built in.
We built a “Web Rover” — an unmanned little robot that we attached a Pinoccio board to, and drove in real-time over the Web from over 10,000 km away.
Here’s a short (2 minute) video of us driving the Web Rover, along with a detailed project description
