“Really big freaking robot. I imagine James Cameron is around here somewhere”. Follow the pics live with our twitter feed, or wait for them to pop up on the blog.
More pics below the fold. Continue reading “Tokyo Maker Faire 2012: Robots and Art day 1”
Superhacker Yoshi with his wireless LAN shield for Arduino. Follow the pics live with our twitter feed, or wait till we post them on the blog.
More pics below the fold. Continue reading “Booths and Exhibits at Tokyo Maker Faire day 1”
Tokyo Hackerspace displays kits and other open hardware at Maker Faire. Follow the pics live with our twitter feed, or wait for them to pop up on the blog.
Food trucks outside Maker Faire Tokyo. Getting ready to cover Faire for Make mag and give a talk at 4 on open hardware. Follow the pics live with our twitter feed, or wait for them to pop up on the blog.
More pics below the fold.
Continue reading “Tokyo Maker Faire 2012: Around the Faire day 1”
At DEFCON 20, Fergus Noble and Colin Beighley discussed the basics of GPS operation and how hackers can access and use its data. They have developed and released a new set of tools which they hope will make GPS accessible to hackers and experimenters. These resources include a library, libswiftnav, which contains a complete toolset for building a GPS receiver, and Piksi, a stand-alone hardware platform to run it on.
Here is a video from the Bell Laboratories archives. It describes the similarities in wave behavior in all mediums, be it electric, sound, or mechanical.
On an elementary conceptual level, this film reflects the multifaceted scientific hyperthinking that was typical of a Bell Labs approach. Host Dr. J.N. Shive’s presence as a lecturer is excellent – it’s understandable by a layperson even when he branches into equations, because he uses copious amounts of real-world examples to bolster the material.
We’ve finalized our xQFP footprints. The pads in the old design were short, making soldering hard. The new design remedies that, and comes with our standard CC BY-SA license. The files are available in our Eagle library.
XC9572XL CPLD development board v1b are back in stock at Seeed Studio. CPLDs are programmable logic gate arrays which allow you to build custom logic devices simply by programing them.
Get the XC9572XL dev-board for $15 and CoolRunner-II development board for $15.
Marcus is designing an 8 channel version of our Logic Shrimp. It features a PIC32 microcontroller driving overclocked SRAM chips for more then 20 MSamples/s. It’s designed to fit a 3cmx3cm PCB rendered above.
Get a Logic Shrimp from Seeed for $35.
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:
S3c writes to inform us that the Bus Pirate got a mention in DEFCON 20 talk on reversing smart meters. From what we were able to ascertain from the video the Bus Pirate is used to read memory devices located on the smart meter boards.
Via the contact form.
Arnar Ingason designed a cool PCB for the vusbtiny. He used circuits.io for the schematic and the PCB design. His design was based on a tutorial by Tino Göhlert.
Via the contact form.
Ian visits Tokyo’s Akihabara electric town, and rides the second coolest escalator ever. Goes up, then flat, the up some more. In case you’re wondering the best escalator was a circular one in Hong Kong Times Square.
We continue to work on our xQFP breakout board updates.
Need a precision reference to make sure your measurements are on the nose? Here is a simple breakout Dolabra designed for just that purpose. It’s a ADR510 based battery powered 1V reference, with +0.35% tolerance and 70 ppm/C temperature stability.
As promised, here are the pictures of stuff we found cool at Akihabara shops. Even though the prices are a little higher then eBay or TaoBao, Akihabara offers you to touch and feel components you couldn’t online. Similar to Shenzhen’s electronic markets, with the advantage that you don’t have to bargain for everything you buy. More pictures below the fold.
Ian’s visiting Tokyo for this weekend’s Maker Faire. He stopped by Akihabara electric town to check out some goodies. Armed with a Japanese data SIM he was able to tweet live pictures of the stroll. More pictures below the fold.
Due to Window 8’s requirement that all drivers need to be signed, some of our boards requiring USB drivers might not work with it. RadiatorTwo shared a workaround witch should work. Basically you need to turn off the signed driver requirement.
You can deactivate the forcing of signed drivers by using following Settings.
Open a Command Prompt (cmd) as Administrator and type in following two commands.
bcdedit -set loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING ONWith bcdedit you´re configurating the bootmenu of windows, so be careful. If something goes wrong you´ll need a windows dvd to repair the bootmanager.
After a restart you can install the driver normally. You just have to confirm to install the unsigned driver, just like in older versions of Windows.
Tim Leek informs us that the Visual Micro crew have extended their Arduino IDE for Visual Studio to include a unique Arduino debugger. “The debugger includes many features such as trace/break/step and update of variables on a running Arduino. The IDE and debugger has been successfully tested with various Seeduino boards. The debugger and graphical visualizations such as “Digital Pins” are open source and currently available for free. The standard IDE plugin is the only fully compatible Arduino plugin available outside of the Arduino IDE. The plugin is free and includes all of the features provided by the Arduino IDE such as upload, burn bootloader and compiles sketches that include multiple PDE/INO source files.”
Continue reading “Visual Micro Arduino IDE for Visual Studio”
Boseji from m8051 gave us these PCBs on the second day of the Bangalore geek tour. We added them to our free PCB drawer.
The QFP package MSP430F5310 is a nice MSP430 chip that can be programmed and debugged using the MSP430 launchpad. They are presently under CC-BY-SA so you can go ahead if you ever need modifications.
Specifically for the Low Cost MSP430G Series – DIP/SMD. They are presently under CC-BY-SA so you can go ahead if you ever need modifications.
