Geek tour planning. Getting USB IDs from Microchip. Finalizing Bus Blaster v3, and v4 for a video this week.
We emailed everyone who wrote, or commented about the geek tour with latest details, if you didn’t get an email please follow up through the contact form.
Worked on today’s 3D model, and rendered it. We started some sales pages for upcoming products.
We’re working on a breakout board that would replace the HD44780 LCDs with a 1.8” TFT.
Mani entered a Telemetry Beacon for HAM satellites using Logic gates for the Open 7400 Logic Competition.
The beacon controller is intended for telemetering of data available on board of the Ham radioSatellite (originally designed for the Indian Satellite VUSAT in Morse code so that the hamradio operators can decode the info without any costly and complex equipment. The designdoes not uses a microcontroller or any processing circuit. The circuit mainly consists of a couplelogic gates and TTL counters.
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.
Congratulations to Nakul, The winner of Friday’s give away!
Here’s TI’s quick start-up guide to their new Stellaris LaunchPad, which is a Cortex M4 based digital signal processor development board.
Via Embedded Lab.
Today’s 3D model is the Logic Shrimp v2b. The newer version uses the single 23LC1024 SRAM instead of four 23K256, and the serial data lines (SD0 – SD3) are now bi-directional.
The Logic Shrimp is a 4 channel, medium speed, low cost logic analyzer with 256K samples and 20MHz top speed.
Check out our tutorial on how to build 3D models from Cadsoft Eagle board files, as well as the tutorial on how to render life like images with Kerkythea.
The models will be published in the Dangerous Prototypes 3D warehouse collection. They are also uploaded to our SVN. You can find them inside the “art” folders in the respective project folders.
jokkebk from Code and Life wrote this short how-to on interfacing the Bus Pirate to communicate with the DS1307 realtime clock. A good description showing beginners how to connect a BP to components or breakout boards and establish communications quickly and easily.
Want to simplify hardware hacking? Get your own Bus Pirate for about $30.
Add some LED goodness to this year’s Halloween pumpkins. This flickering LED design on a pumpkin shaped PCB was drawn up in KiCAD. Grab the design files from the low voltage labs site.
It’s a simple schematic with just a switch, resistor, battery holder and 10mm LED. But makes for a nice easy project to get started with trying out KiCAD. I’ve released the files under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Via the forum.
The “I just bought this, and you what did you buy ?” thread is picking up steam. Hak8or’s latest grab is a AmScope SE400 series stereo microscope. It seems to be a popular choice for a good ~$200 microscope, as JuKu, and Matseng have these as well.
Got some gear you’re proud off? Share it in the forum.
Maxim covers some important things to consider when designing a DC/DC power supply.
Topics include choosing the right DC-DC converter for the application; MOSFET gate capacitance; high switching frequencies and component size; equations and calculations; selecting peripheral components; component placement and trade-offs; grounding; load and line regulation; temperature sensitivity.
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. Our PCBs are made through Seeed Studio’s Fusion board service.
This week two random commenters will get a coupon code for the free PCB drawer tomorrow morning. Pick your own PCB.
You get unlimited free PCBs now – finish one and we’ll send you another!
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times every week:
Here’s an FAQ from Analog Devices regarding proper grounding techniques. Engineer Walt Kester answers questions with references and schematics to better explain his points. All in all, a very good read that might help you catch stray signals problems in your next project.
The freeSoC is a Programmable System on Chip (PSoC) based development board currently being developed by Jon Moeller, a student at Texas A & M University. Freesoc uses the PSoC5 chip from Cypress Semiconductors, which is supported by their free, full-featured PSoC Creator IDE. These programmable logic devices are really amazing and are definitely worth considering by anyone who wants to move up from the hardware limitations of either a MCU or Arduino to a programmable logic platform without losing the advantage of programming in C or having IP libraries included with the IDE.
The Freesoc project has been fully funded via Kickstarter.
Will Emite via the contact form.
When a circuit powers up there’s all kinds of noise and ripples in the power supply. Many microcontrollers have a power-on-reset feature that keeps them reset until the power has stabilized. Without the reset, the chip might start running a program only to get hit by dip in voltage that freezes or resets the chip uncontrollably.
Brown-out-detect is similar. It resets the chip if there’s a dip in the power supply that could send the chip skidding off the road and into a ditch.
Both features are usually combined into one microcontroller pin. The pin is usually connected to the circuit power supply through an external resistor. You might recognize this feature on your favorite chips: ATMEGAs (RESET), MSP430s (RST), PIC (MCLR), and most others.
Microchip writes about how to use POR and BOD devices:
This application note discusses what microcontroller supervisory devices are, why they are needed and some factors to consider when choosing one. Supervisory devices is a broad term that encompasses POR (power on reset) devices, BOD (brown-out detect) devices and watchdog timer devices. This application note will cover supervisor devices with POR and BOD functions only.
Peter(pabigot), the maintainer for mspgcc, has released BPS430, a board support package for MSP430 MCUs. “BSP430 is a set of C language adaptation layers simplifying cross-MCU library and application development on Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontrollers. The target audience is experienced embedded systems developers who need full control over the microcontroller but are willing to trade a small amount of performance for improved component re-usability and rapid prototyping.”
BSP430 currently supports MSP-EXP430G2 (“LaunchPad”), MSP-EXP430FR5739 (“Fraunchpad”), MSP-EXP430F5438,,MSP-EXP430F5529 (“USB Experimenter’s Board”), MSP-EXP430FG4618, EM430-900, PeoplePower Company SuRF Board, TrxEB SmartRF Transceiver Evaluation Board and the EZ430-RF2500T.
Visit Peters BSP430 GitHub page for downloads and more info.
Via 43Oh blog.
Annoyed with unstable voltage sources in your projects? EDN shows how to build a precision voltage reference and an output buffer for a high precision voltage source/sink. Grab the schematic off of EDN’s site.
We reshuffled the Global Geek Tour of India schedule a bit at the last minute. Added the Google layer map of the tour as well. Cleared pending forum support requests, thanks to everyone in the community who helps out on the forum and wiki!
We searched, found, and wrote about the app notes that will be posted over the weekend. The Monday 3D model is prepped, and ready for rendering.
We’re working on an update of the Part Ninja featuring a TFT screen. We’ve hit a snag with it though, as the screen is 3.3V powered, and the Part Ninja works at 5V.
Easton made this 4000-series CMOS 24-hour clock as a final high school electronics class project. Rather than using a microcontroller he chose to use CMOS ICs including a 4060 and 4013 to generate the 1Hz signal. This is the latest entry in the Open 7400 Logic Competition.
For the last couple months a friend and I have been working on a 4000 series based clock in electronics class. After having failed building a FM receiver, we opted for a clock. We didn’t go the microcontroller way, but old school ICs. So, we created a circuit for a simple clock.
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.
Here’s your daily retro fix. Electrontubes is an open source database of old school vacuum tubes (electron tubes). It features pinout, footprint, and some basic information about each part.
This is an open source electrontube catalogue. Its database contents base type, pin-out and some parameters of components. This database is refreshing continuosly. If you are on-line and new version is available, Tubes upgrades database. Or you can download it from homepage and install manually.
Via Electronics Lab.
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:
What are you hacking this week?
