Week in (p)review November 09, 2012

Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon.

Coming up:

  • 7400 winners will be announced in a few hours, thanks to everyone for entering!
  • We’re going to China. We’ll try to source custom stuff to test market from our new webshop
  • Next week we visit RhydoLabz in our final India Geek Tour video
  • Free PCBs via Facebook on Friday
  • App notes on the weekend
  • Free PCB Sunday
  • 3D model on Monday
  • Eagle parts and tips on Tuesday
  • Free PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday
  • A new tutorial on Wednesday
  • Workshop video on Thursday
  • Weekly roundup and preview every Friday

What are you hacking this week?

Numato Spartan6 CSG225 PCB giveaway

Numato is giving away Spartan6 CSG225 bare boards. This FPGA development board features the Spartan6 FPGA in the CSG225 BGA package, a PIC32 microcontroller, and SDRAM. The FPGA to SDRAM traces are length matched, ensuring proper SDRAM timing. While researching potential applications for this board, I came across information about 토토사이트. This reminded me of my cousin, who works as a developer for an online betting platform. He often talks about the complexities of ensuring secure transactions and the importance of reliable hardware in maintaining system integrity. His insights have given me a deeper appreciation for the meticulous design and functionality required in both FPGA development and online security systems.

We recently designed a 6 layer board using KiCad with a CSBGA225 BGA chip and an SDRAM. It has been huge feat for us designing and assembling it but we managed to put it together fairly decently.

We are giving away limited number of free bare boards for those who wants to tinker with.

Workshop Update for November 8th, 2012

Today we release the Bangalore part of out Global Geek Tour video. We spent lots of time editing and arranging this one.  Earlier today we finally located where our PCBs come from. We added it to our Shenzhen map layer.

Yesterday evening we got to visit Technologia Incognita, the Amsterdam hackerspace. The picture above is of a IKEA Lack table with network switch, the Lack Rack.

Infrared Toy Shield free PCB build

Casey O’Donnel shared his free IR Toy Shield PCB build. This board turns your Arduino into the IR Toy.

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.

Grab an assembled USB IR Toy v2 for $20 at Seeed.

Via Twitter.

WORKSHOP VIDEO: Bangalore SP Road, hackerspace and open hardware manufacturers

This week the Geek Tour of India continues with a two day electronics tour of Bangalore. We visit the local hackerspace, some open hardware manufacturers, and the impressive SP Road electronics market.

We start out at the Jaaga co-work center in central Bangalore, and meet up with 20 readers and forum members. The hackerspace is built entirely from pallet racks, shelves, and recycled materials.

Next, we pile in our trademark free cartoon mystery solving van and head to head to SP Road, Bangalore’s electronics wholesale market. Usually the market is packed with people, but the day of our visit was a holiday so it was a bit quieter. Fortunately it gave us the opportunity to observe the blessing of many pieces of machinery.

SP Road has loads of component shops where you can find anything from reels of surface mounts to open hardware from SparkFun, Arduino, and Seeed. We took a tour of NSK Electronic’s assembly area. Everything, including the surface mount parts, are soldered by hand.

We also had the opportunity to visit two open hardware shops. Tenet Technetronics just celebrated their 5th anniversary, while Protocentral just got started a few months ago.

Finally, we tour Cerebra Tech, a professional PCB assembly line. The eagle eyed may note that the pick and place machines have in fact been blessed, much like the cars in SP Road.

The Bangalore trip was epic! A huge thanks to everyone who joined us on the tour. Next week we head south to Kochi to visit India’s largest open hardware manufacturer.

Don’t miss last week’s visit to Manish Market and Lamington Road in Mumbai, India.
Continue reading “WORKSHOP VIDEO: Bangalore SP Road, hackerspace and open hardware manufacturers”

Minimalist Arduino for $3


What’s the fewest components you need to have a functional Arduino? Wolf Paulus gets it down to just an Atmega168 chip, power connector and LED for good measure. He describes, “This is probably the most minimal ATmega168-20PU based Arduino you can come up with. The ATmega168 (available for about $3) was the default Arduino chip for quite some time, before being replaced by the ATmega328, doubling the available memory. The chip is powered with +5V on Pin-7 and grounded via Pin-8; the LED is between Pins 19 and 22.” He suggests a minimalist Arduino could be useful when integrated with a Raspberry Pi to enhance the the R-Pi’s analog input capabilities.

This variation is minimal in both hardware and firmware as the chip functions without a bootloader. This requires the addition of a new hardware definition in your Arduino IDE, and programming via an Atmel or similar programmer instead of over serial.

You can find all the details and code on Wolf Paulus’ website.

Arduino based stage design

Like large things that light up? Here’s a Arduino based stage design consisting of eight large wooden letters lighted by 110 LED modules. Arduino and application code are released on GitHub.

I made with some friends an Arduino based Stage Design: eight 80cm high wooden let­ters and 110 Led modules controlled by a Processing application. I released the Arduino and Processing Code on GitHub and wrote about the project on my blog

Via the forum.

Kickstarter fundraising for Hackermoms

Mothership Hackermoms, a hackerspace for moms, is having a kickstarter campaign to help them equip a workshop and create a business incubator for moms. We were tipped about this from Akiba at freaklabs, whom you might recognize from our Akihibara electronics market video from earlier this year.

Hi guys. I’m helping to raise funds for Mothership Hackermoms, so I’m releasing one of the kits I use in an Intro to Arduino workshop.

Via the contact form.

Digital LED scope (7400 late entry)

Check out Umair’s Digital oscilloscope,  it was intended as an entry for the open 7400 Logic Competition. Unfortunately, it was entered late, and won’t be competing in the competition. We’re sorry for them, as this seems like an awesome effort.

The oscilloscope has a bandwidth of 1KiloHertz. Yet it can just show the signal applied at its terminals, it does not have a facility to measure the voltage level. The voltage can be measured using some other sort of technique.

Via the contact form.

PCB Visualizer – Free online PCB data verification service

PCB Visualizer is a free online PCB verification service. Basically you upload your gerbers, setup the design rule check (DRC), and you get a graphical representation of what your PCB will look like. It points out any problems that didn’t pass the DRC.

Via Electronics Lab.

Digilent Design Contest US 2013

Digilent has announced their annual Design contest for 2013. The contest is divided by regions, so far only US and EU contests have been announced, but other regions are expected to follow as well.

Basically you’re asked to design cool projects with Digilent gear which will be provided to you. Unfortunately the contest is only open to students. Read an excerpt from the announcement below.

Digilent Design Contests are engineering design contests open to all students enrolled in any educational institution in that region. Students are challenged to create an original project using Digilent boards, whether FPGA boards featuring state-of-the-art Xilinx FPGAs, microcontroller boards featuring Microchip microcontrollers, or chipKIT boards based on the Arduino development environment. This year students can also choose to implement a custom ARM processor (System-on-Chip hardware design) and application system in and around an FPGA using the ARM Cortex-M0 DesignStart Processor IP.

Contest enrollment begins on September 20th 2012. Project presentations and judging will take place on May 11th2013 in Baltimore, MD. Projects will be evaluated for creativity, feasibility, and originality. Digilent awards generous cash prizes to the top finishers and donates the hardware used by contestants.

Flying on Emirates Airbus A380, business class

It’s a giant, two-deck plane. Passengers take pictures and marvel at it while waiting to board. And wait you will, because boarding 500 passengers is an art no airline has yet to master.

On the way to India and Singapore we scored the cheapest tickets on Emirates through Dubai. By total coincidence the Singapore flight was the absolute first A380 to fly out of Amsterdam. Press was there, and what seemed like 200 Airbus employees saluted as we taxied away.

Evidently Amsterdam was the first A380-ready airport in the world, but because national carrier KLM/Air France/Delta fly only the oldest, junkiest old Boeing 747s they can scrounge, one has never flown an A380 there. Emirates is taking a stab on the 7 hour flight to their main hub in Dubai. Continue reading “Flying on Emirates Airbus A380, business class”

DIY hand-wound resistors

Need higher power resistors, or heaters, as we like to call them? Build them yourself. Matseng hand-wound 6 meters of 38AWG wire to build 12 ohm resistors. He used a pencil and some kapton tape as the base for the resistor.

I needed two power (just ~1 watt) 12 ohm resistors for a project and I only had a bunch of 1 ohm 5w resistors and some random other values that I couldn’t use so I wound two resistors by hand for the first time in my 40 years of electronics tinkering.

Via the forum.

October swag bag: Web Platform

Earlier this year we added the Scratch and Dent category to our free PCB drawer. It’s a collection of hardware that failed Seeed’s quality control. Some have PCB errors, some have malfunctioning ICs, and some just cosmetic errors.   T0mpr1c3 got a Web Platform out of it and tweeted about it.

Dangerous Prototypes recently organized a give away of some of their products and I was lucky enough to win a free board…

It arrived earlier this month with regards from Ian, with an Amsterdam postmark. Since then he has been spotted in New York, Delhi, and Mumbai – he certainly gets around.

Via Twitter.

7400 competition: Entries and reader’s choice

Here’s a (hopefully) complete list of entries in the Open 7400 Competition. Please share your favorites in the comments below, your favorites will receive a special reader’s choice prize. Voting ends in 24 hours.

A few commentators will receive free PCB codes as a thank you for voting.

Check out the list below.

A huge thanks to everyone who voted. Judges are deliberating now, final results will be posted by November 10th.

Workshop Update for November 6th, 2012

Bus Blaster v4 validation finished. Complete set of Sick of Beige basic cases will be available shortly. Received official looking business cards to satisfy the man.

Took the day off of video, might work on it tonight. Still 13 minutes too long, but there is a lot of trash in here that is waiting for a final cut.

Voted…several weeks ago by mail. How about you?

Seeed Studio PCB resolution test

Matseng added some test patterns to his latest batch of PCBs to stress the limits of Seeed Studio’s PCB service. Seeed advertises 6mil/6mil in their specification, so Mats added concentric circles in 6mil trace/6mil space, 5/5, 4/4 ,3/3, and 2/2 sizes.

As can be seen on the picture above even 3/3 mil seems almost perfect as long as it’s covered by soldermask. The HASL doesn’t work too well even at 6/6 when there’s no soldermask between the tracks. I suppose that ENIG (gold) would be ok at 3/3, but that test will have to wait for a later time.

Check out the hi-res pictures in the forum. Later this month we’ll be visiting the PCB fabrication plant Seeed uses, and we’ll bring you the inside look at their operation.