Just a reminder to all potential entries that the deadline is October 31st. You now have only 5 days to submit your entry. Good luck!
Build something that uses or abuses a logic chip and get amazing boards, tools, and other swag. The Open 7400 Logic Competition promotes awareness of the basic building blocks of modern circuits. Devious geeks ignited the computer revolution with discrete logic computers, what can you do? Details and entry form here.
Today will be marked as the stone age day of Dangerous Prototypes. While visiting Kochi, and the rhydoLABZ factory on our Global Geek Tour of India, we had no data coverage so we were incommunicado.
Similarly in the workshop internet went down, and we were unable to bring you the regular compliment of posts. We’re sorry, we’ll make it up over the weekend.
We did get a chance to finish updating the xQFP boards, and QFP protoboards.
Mathemagic, mind reader or a decoder, you decide. This open 7400 competition entry bases it’s magical properties in a mathematical game of coding and decoding numbers in binary sequences.
The concept behind this is a BCD to 7-Segment decoder(IC7447). The unit and tens place of the number are in BCD. For example let’s consider the number 24
Number 2 4 – This in BCD would be 0010 0100. Thus this number would be found in sheet3 and sheet6. When you press these corresponding switches, the number would come up in the 7-segment display.
Build something that uses or abuses a logic chip and get amazing boards, tools, and other swag. The Open 7400 Logic Competition promotes awareness of the basic building blocks of modern circuits. Devious geeks ignited the computer revolution with discrete logic computers, what can you do? Details and entry form here.
Via the contact form.
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 an open source project by Dimitar Gamishev which demonstrates how to communicate using I2C in Android applications. As shown in this project Dimitar uses this code with an A13-OLinuXino running Android to drive relays and read ADCs and GPIOs on a connected MOD-IO board.
Tsvetan Usunov via the contact form.
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon.
Coming up:
What are you hacking this week?
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.
Today was day two of the Bangalore leg of out Global Geek Tour of India. We’re of for Kochi, and the rhydoLABZ factory tour. Check out live updates on Twitter, or wait ’till we post them on the blog.
We continue working on xQFP breakout boards. We’ve seen community members use previous versions for a wide range of custom hardware. Recent forum builds include specialized audio mixers, mechanical keyboard matrices, and secure input controllers designed for overseas casinos. Today we tackled the 0.65mm, and the 0.50mm pad pitch footprint. Tomorrow we plan to modify the protoboards that use these footprints as well.
Arbitrary waveform generator designed by NiHaoMike is a Open 7400 competition entry. It uses a serial link with a computer to load up a W24512A SRAM IC which is then clocked out into a TLC7524 digital to analog converter.
This is really just for fun – it doesn’t make a very good function generator by modern standards. (If I wanted something to actually use, I would start with a FPGA…) Apart from that, however, it can generate a number of waveforms that an old analog function generator cannot. It uses a PC with a serial port to supply the waveform data.
Build something that uses or abuses a logic chip and get amazing boards, tools, and other swag. The Open 7400 Logic Competition promotes awareness of the basic building blocks of modern circuits. Devious geeks ignited the computer revolution with discrete logic computers, what can you do? Details and entry form here.
Global Geek Tour Bangalore day two. Assembly at NSK electronics. 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 “GLOBAL GEEK TOUR: Day two begins Bangalore, India”
Juan built a free SARduino328 v0.1 PCB. As the name suggests this is a Arduino compatible board. Only this one has lots and lots of SMD and through hole breakouts making it very customizable.
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.
Via the contact form.
BizzyBee breadboard is a simple concept. Take an Arduino, and stick it into the breadboard. You get access to the Arduino pins through a header sticking out of the center of the breadboard.
The concept is modular, with an FTDI and power board add on, and a separate Arduino shield compatible breakout board.
Via Electronics Lab.
Giving a talk on open source hardware to a really generous audience at the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore.
Watch for live updates of our Global Geek Tour of India on twitter. If you hate the social media craze wait for it to pop on the blog.
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.
The Raspberry Pi crew reports that the VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM is now available under a FOSS license (3-Clause BSD to be precise. “The BCM2835 used in the Raspberry Pi is the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers, and that Broadcom is the first vendor to open their mobile GPU drivers up in this way.”
The code is available on the R-Pi GitHub page including the source code for the ARM side libraries used on Raspberry Pi.
Squonk via the contact form.
Today we’re on the second leg of our Global Geek Tour of India. We got together with other hackers from Bangalore and toured the city’s electronics sights. We started in the Jaaga hackerspace and continued to the SP road markets.
We’re continuing work on the xQFP proto-board updates.
Relative clock/timer/alarm designed by Victor, and entered in the open 7400 Logic Competition.
Towards the end of the ’80s, when I started out in electronics, one day I decided to make a special alarm clock: one, that, when the time comes, switches on some device in my room – be it a radio, TV or anything else. At the time microcontrollers were not easy to find and I didn’t even know how to deal with them anyway, and so I decided to make this circuit out of TTL chips (74xx series).
Build something that uses or abuses a logic chip and get amazing boards, tools, and other swag. The Open 7400 Logic Competition promotes awareness of the basic building blocks of modern circuits. Devious geeks ignited the computer revolution with discrete logic computers, what can you do? Details and entry form here.
Via the contact form.
First stop on the Bangalore tour is SP Road! 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 “GLOBAL GEEK TOUR: SP road market in Bangalore, India”
Here is proof that soldering BGA’s is not that hard. Check out this Mandelbrot zoom fractal engine with a PSP display project (machine translation). The FPGA in a ball grid array package is soldered dead bug style. Now that’s skill.
Via the forum, and Hack a Day.
David Darts, Associate Professor of Art Education and Chair, Department of Art and Art Professions wanted to facilitate anonymous file sharing in his NYU classes. He was aware of the deaddrops project and wanted to design a WiFi based portable version which would operate separate from the Internet. “PirateBox is a self-contained mobile communication and file sharing device. Inspired by pirate radio and the free culture movement, PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) to create mobile wireless file sharing networks where users can anonymously chat and share images, video, audio, documents, and other digital content.”
The basic system consists of a lightweight web server connected to a wireless device. David has posted various approaches to the construction of a PirateBox on his website, including tutorials using an OpenWRT router, plug computer, laptop and an Android mobile phone.
