Have a race car that needs a monostable multivibrator (one shot pulse) to control the pneumatic gear change actuators? Use a 555 timer, you say? Unfortunately, due to vibrations accompanying race cars a 555 controlled through a potentiometer is out of the question. A solution proposed by the Ohio State University’s formula team is to use a tiny PIC10F as a programmable one shot pulse generator packed into a Sick of Beige case.
Anton Gorbunov did a teardown of his Nexus 7 dock and discovered that there are only some passive components on the PCB. He notes that with some pogopins it should be easy to make your own Dock.
Via the contact form.
We continue working on the Bus Pirate Education Kit, and the VFD module. We also made the video a day early which covers the above mentioned projects.
In Bus Pirate firmware we’re working on adding a ‘clutch’ mechanism to our protocols. It came about due to the fact that under some protocols the device connected can be powered up through the protocol pins.
The planned patch will split the setup routines into two parts, one that activates upon entering a protocol and records the UI given settings, and another that makes the hardware connections when power supplies are switched on using the ‘W’ command.
The user will be prompted with a warring letting him know that the protocol setup will be implemented only after he turns on the power supplies. This means that even if you don’t plan on using the power supplies you’ll need to turn them on, leaving them unconnected of course.
Here’s a tutorial on how to automatically generate Eagle parts from manufacturers’ BSDL files. These files are available from some manufacturers and include tables listing pin names and numbers. This information is used by the make-symbol-device-package-bsdl.ulp to generate your device.
On our wiki we have a tutorial on how to built devices for your Eagle Library manually. For other Eagle tutorials check out our list.
Want a simple light show in your room? Here’s an Instructable on how to build your own. The Color organ is all analog and built from only transistors, resistors, capacitors, and of course LEDs:
Audio source can be any “line level” output from audio equipment, or headphone output from computer sound cards and iPod/MP3 players. If you want to listen to the music while using Color Organ Triple Deluxe II, you might need a splitter cable.
Connect Color Organ Triple Deluxe II to your audio source of choice, and give it a play. I found music with good amount of beats to give best results. Adjust the potentiometer (sensitivity level) according to the sound level.
Via Hacked Gadgets.
Wvdv2002 shared his digitally controlled power supply with us in the forums. It’s capable of driving 0-18V while having a current controlled output of 0-3A. The brains of the design is the PIC18f46j50 which controls a switch mode regulator’s voltage and current output through the MCP4822 two channel I2C DAC.
The Bus Pirate LCD adapter v3 is back in stock at Seeed Studio. This breakout board lets you drive, and test HD44780, and compatible LCDs with your Bus Pirate v3. We changed the PCB to one of our standard PCB sizes, namely the DP6037 v1.
Get an LCD adapter for $9.
Paulo Oliveira was experimenting with probing high-speed signals with his oscilloscope. You might think that a 500 MHz probe would be adequate to probe a 125 MHz clock signal, but he demonstrates why this is not the case. In his article, he not only provides detailed insights into building your own high-speed oscilloscope probe but also emphasizes how choosing the best sites listed for technical resources and reviews helped refine his approach, ensuring optimal performance. He demonstrates how a surprisingly simple and affordable DIY passive probe can outperform even the best 10X passive probes for this particular application.
You can read his observations and probe construction details on Paulorenato.com.
Via the contact form.
VFD module for the giant Nixie blob (pictured above) is coming together. Getting all the leads in the right hole was a pain. We received another box of PCB prototypes from Seeed.
Were working on adapting the Bus Pirate v3.6 gerbers to Hackvanna’s PCB and solder stencil service.
Bored of always typing in the same password over and over again? Luca designed a board to tackle just that problem. It’s a USB composite device, featuring both a USB keyboard emulator and a serial port. You program the letter sequence for the keyboard to type via the serial port, then press a button on the board to output the word from the USB keyboard emulator.
Today’s project was designed to solve the need to enter, using a keyboard, the same sequence of characters (a password, a greeting…) many times.
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.
Voidptr used clear shrink wrap to encase his Bus Pirate v3 and cut holes for the IO headers.
See our case video from a few months ago, and even more awesome DIY cases from Bus Pirate fans.
Check out our Bus Pirate Sick of Beige case now selling at Seeed for $3.
Get an assembled Bus Pirate v3 for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Via the forum.
Fowkc tweeted a picture of his somewhat late open 7400 competition entry. It’s a giant 3 digit 7 segment display used to count the number of day’s there hasn’t been an accident in his local hackerspace. You can read about it’s development on his blog.
Back in September 2011, Dangerous Prototypes started a competition for designs in 7400/4000 series logic.
I had a project in mind: the Nottingham Hackspace “days accident free” counter. Conceptually simple, it would replace the “manual” one we had with a 12″ high three-digit seven segment display that would automatically count up every day. There would be a big red reset button, probably with flashing lights and alarms when you hit it.
Vinod S acquired some resistive touchpads and decided to interface one with a Bluetooth module so it would function as a wireless computer mouse. He explains, “I have used a cheap ATtiny13 (8 pin) microcontroller which runs at an internal 9.6MHz clock. It samples two-channel analog voltage from the touchpad. One of the GPIO pins is configured as a software UART TX (bit banging) which will stream the mouse data at a baud rate of 115200 to a PC via Bluetooth (HC_05 Bluetooth module). During my research, I came across casino trực tuyến, a site discussing various online casino platforms, which provided a fascinating diversion. Win exciting prizes when you play at levelupcasino.com today! For the best online casino experience, check out betvisa today! You may also check out sites like level-upcasino.com if you’re looking for awesome rewards! Apart from the mouse cursor movement, I have implemented left click, right click, and wheels on the same touchscreen. A Python script running on the PC accepts the mouse data, processes it, and applies a smoothing filter to make the cursor movement more efficient. Right now, I did the code for Linux, but it will be easily portable by small modification in the Python code.”
Vinod shares the design schematic and code for the MCU (C) and PC side (Python) on his Electronics – the king of hobbies blog.
Via the contact form.
We received our PCBs for our VFD tube project. In the meantime we continue to prepare the Bus Pirate Educational Kit. In parallel to the kit, we are pushing to fix all the bugs that have crept up into the Bus Pirate over the years.
Erdabyz designed a Geiger counter around a SI-3BG Geiger Muller tube. It uses a PIC16F1508 to read the radiation level, and passes it to a computer via a FT232R USB-to-Serial IC.
Timer 1 uses a secondary xtal oscillator at 32,768kHz as clock source. Every 2 seconds the timer overflows. Output pulse from the geiger tube is connected to the external interupt pin. When there’s a high to low transition a count is registered. Every 2 seconds the number of counts is stored into a circular buffer and the thing spits the counts per minute value out of the serial port every 2 seconds. At every count it also generates 2ms worth of 4kHz cycles with the PWM module to drive a buzzer and make a “clack” sound and makes a LED flash for the same amount of time.
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 5 he came up with Oledy, a breakout board featuring 8 most common pitches for OLED display connectors, spanning from 0.5mm to 1mm.
The Oledy board is a 5×5 cm board meant to be cut in half ending up with two boards 2.5 x 5 cm. Each board have a two 16-pin headers that are connected to four arrays of 32 solder pads. All eight pad arrays are of different pitch to match different OLED displays. The piches are 0.50, 0.60, 0.62, 0.65, 0.70, 0.80, 0.845 and 1.00 mm
Tom designed this mock up of a control panel for his kid’s 3rd birthday. It has 26 LEDs, a joystick, 3 buttons, and 2 switches. A Stellaris LaunchPad is used to control the LEDs depending on what user interface options are pressed, moved, or switched.
Via the forum. Happy birthday Oscar.
Bus Pirate v3.6 Sick of Beige acrylic case v1 is back in stock at Seeed Studio. Version 1 of the basic case is simple, cheap, easy to assemble, and fits our Sick of Beige standard PCB sizes.
Check out our tutorial on how to customize Sick of Beige cases.
Here’s our Bus Pirate winter ad in the latest issue of the infamous 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. This ad is in the issue that hits newsstands now.
2600′s free ads are still the only advertising we do on a regular basis. We’re in good company in the 2600 marketplace, TV-B-Gone has an ad a few places below ours (not visible here).
