National Instruments acquires Digilent Inc

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Here’s a bit of industry news, National Instrument’s acquired Digilent Inc. Digilent is a manufacturer of educational and development boards for FPGAs, microcontrollers, and PSoCs. They were also kind enough to sponsor our latest open 7400 contest with two Analog Discovery bench tools.

National Instruments (NI) recently acquired all the outstanding shares of Digilent Inc. Digilent will operate as a wholly-owned NI subsidiary under the existing leadership at its current locations in Pullman, Washington and Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Emulating an LCD controller with a Papailio

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Alex received a monochrome 256×128 LCD with a missing controller chip. The board features 8 Hitachi LCD drivers, but without the controller you have to drive the display by constantly sending data to refresh the picture. After some research he stumbled onto the Hitachi LCD controller driver LSI data book, which gave him enough info to develop the controller on the Papilio board.

I couldn’t find a datasheet for it or pinouts so I went old school and tracked down datasheets for the chips on board and did some reverse engineering of the schematic using a continuity meter. A very good datasheet resource is the “Hitachi LCD Controller Driver LSI Data Book” which is a compendium of a large number of Hitachi LCD controller chips.

Via Gadget Factory.

$5000 pick and place

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This is a $5000 pick and place by the people who made the reflow oven we bought yesterday. Not as cheap as the $3200 PNP discussed in the forum recently, but we can’t see that one because they are in Shanghai.

They demoed with 0402 and it worked quite well and super fast. Even on a non level table that was shaking like crazy. Has two pickups but only one seemed to place parts in the demo. Would be perfect for placing passives on prototypes in conjunction with a solder plaster dispenser.

Placement data was on an SD card in CSV format. The screen had an interface that seemed suspiciously like Windows Mobile or some similar poison.

Dangerous Prototypes kits on EEVBlog #413 mailbag

Ernesto sent a few of our PCBs to the EEVblog. Dave opened them up and featured them in his latest mailbag video. The featured PCBs are:

A big thanks to Ernesto and Dave!

#FreePCB via Twitter to 2 random RTs

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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:

  • Hate Twitter and Facebook? Free PCB Sunday is the classic PCB giveaway. Catch it every Sunday, right here on the blog
  • Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
  • Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs will be your friend for the weekend

Some stuff:

  • Yes, we’ll mail it anywhere in the world!
  • Check out how we mail PCBs worldwide video.
  • We’ll contact you via Twitter with a coupon code for the PCB drawer.
  • Limit one PCB per address per month please.
  • Like everything else on this site, PCBs are offered without warranty.

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.

Bus Pirate Arduino Shield free PCB build

Andrew built a Bus Pirate Arduino Shield from a free PCB. This board gives the Arduino the same front-end circuity as the Bus Pirate.

If you build a free PCB we’ll send you another one! Blog about it, post a picture on Flicker, whatever – we’ll send you a coupon code for the free PCB drawer.

Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.

Shipping goodies from Shenzhen

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Checked prices from shippers right in the market yesterday. You can buy stuff and haul it over there piece by piece if you can’t carry it all. You could probably hire someone to cart it too, but hauling treasure through the market is a point of pride.

Best rates for FedEx air freight (6 to 8 days) are 26 rmb per kilo 20kg to 50kg, and 24rmb for 50kg plus. They packed the test rig well and boxed everything for no extra charge.

Initially our haul was 17kg, which would be 660rmb (110 bucks). 21 kg is only 548rmb so we had to add a few things last minute. First we got a few bars of solder for solder pots, that was another 2kg. Then, in an act of desperation, we bought a 2kg rock for 10rmb from a guy digging up the sidewalk. Take that FedEx!

220 dollar IR reflow oven

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Picked up this infrared reflow oven for 1400 rmb, about 200 bucks, in Shenzhen. It isn’t the at923 (or whatever) that shows up on eBay for $300, and lacks the viewing window. Comes highly recommended by Dimitri at SmARtMAKER, and seemed better built than the other one which was available at the stand next door. Still only two or tubes but the center area is even over the space of at least the eagle minimum size.

Also bought a hotplate for 300rmb, about 45 bucks. Also a metal solder paste squeegy to use with the boards and stencil on the way from Hackvana.

RFID Multipass spoof using ATTiny85

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Hudson from NYC Resistor was inspired by Beth’s avrfid.S project to try to build a replacement for the multiple HID Prox card he carried for work. Hudson notes that “Beth’s design is simultaneously a technical tour-de-force and an example of how badly we can abuse the Atmel chips.” The entire schematic consists of an ATTiny85 and a coil!

He used the Bus Pirate to help programming the ATTiny85. “Once the fuse bits have been configured to use the RF waveform as the clock source the chip will no longer be programmable with a normal AVR ISP. One option is to use Dangerous Prototypes’ Bus Pirate, which can provide a “recovery” clock during programming. Unfortunately it didn’t work for me with the current release of avrdude; I had to make the following patches to the avrdude/buspirate.c source to get it to work.”

Read Hudson’s post on NYC Resistor’s website for complete details, code and more photos.

Kevin via the contact form.

Android Accessory Development kit free PCB build

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Mikelelere built a free Android Accessory Development kit PCB.

I’ve assembled over the weekend a free PCB I received last week: the Android Open Accessory Kit. When I ordered this PCB from the free PCB drawer I noticed a paragraph that indicated that the PIC footprint was the wrong size (the pitch was too large and it was bigger than the actual chip). It was indeed for the original PIC the board was designed for (a PIC24, I think). However, the footprint was perfect to solder a PIC32MX795F512L in there (most pic24 and pic32 chips share a common pinout), and that’s what I did. Now I have a nice PIC32 development board with a powerful PIC onboard.

If you build a free PCB we’ll send you another one! Blog about it, post a picture on Flicker, whatever – we’ll send you a coupon code for the free PCB drawer.