Today we continue to edit the material we recorded on our Global Geek Tour of New York. Part one is complete only 3 more to go.
We finished up the initial setup for the VFD PCBs (see picture). There are a total of 3 boards. One holds the electronics, another has the VFD soldered into it, and the last one holds the tops of the tubes in place.
Terasic donated a DE0-Nano development kit to the Open 7400 Competition. Get your entry in and this and other cool hardware can be yours.
The DE0-Nano board introduces a compact-sized FPGA development platform suited for prototyping circuit designs such as robots and “portable” projects. The board is designed to be used in the simplest possible implementation targeting the Cyclone IV device up to 22,320 LEs.
Thank you to Terasic for sponsoring the 2012 Open 7400 Logic Competition!
Grapsus built a free Bus Blaster v4.1 PCB. The Bus Blaster is a high-speed JTAG debugger for ARM processors, FPGAs, CPLDs, flash memory, and more.
If you build a free PCB we’ll send you another one! Blog about it, post a picture on Flickr, whatever – we’ll send you a coupon code for the free PCB drawer.
Alex connected up an salvaged laptop LCD to his Papilio Plus FPGA development board. He is designing a pair of boards for easier interface, one is designed as a wing for the dev board, and the other as a breakout for the LCD. They’ll be connected together via an HDMI cable, even though the protocol used won’t be HDMI.
Additionally the panel is driven with four LVDS differential pairs, three for data and one for clock. Currently I have all the signals soldered to a small perfboard with a header that plugs into wing slots BH and AL. The reason I chose these slots is because I need differential signal pins and no single wing alone provides these.
Via the Gadget Factory.
Here is a recording of the “USB and Open Hardware: A Sketchy History” presentation Ian gave at the Open Hardware Summit 2012. The presentation covers the history and conflicts between USB and Open Hardware.
Audio feed is direct from the H1N and a lapel microphone. Shaky cam by our very own Mad Skillz.
Ian tried it out in a previous video, but since then we’ve refined and illustrated the presentation. You can download the latest files (Open Office Presenter, or PDF) from our SVN.
LOpen is a PIC-based logic probe that fits inside a pen. It detects if a pin is at a logic ‘High’, logic “Low”, or at high impedance (floating).
This time it’s a Logic Pen controlled by a tiny 6-pin PIC10F202. The PCB is 5 cm by 5mm so it fits just fine inside a regular ballpoint pen and have 5 leds (1 power led and 4 controllable from the PIC), over voltage protection on the probe input, reverse polarity protection using a p-fet.
The community is already discussing adaptations for the tiny board, noting that the pen-sized form factor is perfect for crowded workbenches. Members have outlined plans to use it for debugging compact desktop peripherals, ranging from custom video editing dials and automated cryptocurrency trading rigs to mechanical macro pads built to play online poker for money.
Texas Instrument just released the Stellaris LaunchPad for sale for less then $5. It’s a LaunchPad series development board based around the Cortex M4 Stellaris family of digital signal processors.
The Stellaris LaunchPad is the latest addition to the Texas Instruments LaunchPad ecosystem, an innovative portfolio of low-price evaluation kits and expansion boards that lets engineers experiment and develop with easy-to-use, modular design environments. The Stellaris LaunchPad uses the BoosterPack XL connection standard that consists of two pairs of dual gender 20-pin stackable headers.
Alex got his hands on one and wrote a review we blogged about earlier.
Earthmake has announced the release of the ArduinoLCD, a combination Arduino UNO board and ezLCD into a single product capable of accepting all Arduino
compatible shields. The ezLCD is a 3.5″ TFT color LCD with 320 x 240 resolution and 65k colors. The combo may be programmed using the Arduino IDE and the Arduino ezLCD library. They’ve also include an API known as EarthSEMPL (Simple Embedded Macro Programming Language) which is fully explained in the User Manual.
ArduinoLCD is available at the introductory price of $79 until November 11, 2012 from Earthmake.
We just got back to the workshop, and we are hard at work editing all the material we collected at the New York Global Geek Tour. On top of this we are making travel arrangements for China at the end of fall.
We added a few parts to our Eagle library, one of which was featured today. We continued work on the VFD tube holder board with the routing nearly complete.
Electronics-Lab.com sponsored the Open 7400 Logic Competition, these great books will be in the prize pool:
Thank you to Electronics-Lab.com for sponsoring the 2012 Open 7400 Logic Competition!
Mikelelere wanted to play around with the Part Ninja, but he didn’t have one of our PCBs. He used a perfboard to build his own. His goal is to integrate ESR measurement:
I’ve just finished building the Part Ninja v1 on a perf board. It’s a little nice tool, and it’s great for identifying different BJTs and MOSFETS apart from other parts.
The Part Ninja is a electronic component testing tool. It identifies electronic components like transistors and FETs, determines the pinout, and measures basic specifications.
Via the forum.
We added MIC2027 Quad USB power distribution switch to our Eagle library. This part is used to limit the outgoing current to the USB maximum 500mA.
In case of a short circuit, an over-current pin for the corresponding channel is raised high. At the same time the device switches to a current limiting mode. This gives the controller the opportunity to switch off the power via the corresponding EN pin.
MIC20xx family of devices seem as a very good alternative to fuses in power supplies with microcontrollers. They come in 800mA, 1A, and 1.2A current limit versions, as well as adjustable ones. Versions with automatic circuit breaking can be found as well, which cut the power in an over-current event, instead of limiting it. Other features include thermal shutdown, and under-voltage protection.
At the recent BlackBerry Jam Americas conference, developers who filled out a survey about their experience at the conference were given Arduino boards for open source prototyping. The wireless device manufacturer handed out Arduino Uno boards with the hope of generating interest among third-party developers in developing coupled hardware and software solutions potentially with BlackBerry 10 or other platforms.
Via N4BB.
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.
Tom wanted to operate the panning of his webcam via foot pedal. The solution he came up with was to use the old Guitar Hero wireless pedals. He reverse engendered the PlayStation protocol to allow his Arduino to communicate with the pedals. What he ended up with were 2 wireless pedals with linear position reporting.
I wanted an electronic footpedal, and wasn’t prepared to drop $50 on a wah-wah case. What were the DIY options? Making the mechanism from scratch seemed laborious and likely to disappoint. Hacking a sewing machine pedal was a possibility but I couldn’t find anything suitable. What I ended up with was an obsolete Guitar Hero peripheral.
Via the forum.
Don’t touch my tardis! More photos below the fold. Continue reading “More from Maker Faire NYC 2012”
Today we fly back from the awesome New York Global Geek Tour 2012. Expect lots of pictures, reports, and videos during the week.
We modeled and rendered the Smoke Tester. It took longer than usual as we had to model some of the components ourselves.
The VFD tube holder board development continues. We had issues with the tube pads overlapping. We fixed this by offsetting each pad a little bit, as shown in the picture.
Microchip donated an ICD 3 and an Explorer16 to the Open 7400 Competition. Get your entry in and this and other cool hardware can be yours.
MPLAB® ICD 3 In-Circuit Debugger System is Microchip’s most cost effective high-speed hardware debugger/programmer for Microchip Flash Digital Signal Controller (DSC) and microcontroller (MCU) devices.
The Explorer 16 is a low cost, efficient development board to evaluate the features and performance of Microchip’s new PIC24 Microcontroller, the dsPIC33 Digital Signal Controller (DSC) families, and the new 32-bit PIC32MX devices.
Thank you to Microchip for sponsoring the 2012 Open 7400 Logic Competition!
