If you didn’t get to DEFCON 20 this year you can still try you hand at badge hacking. This year’s badge featured the Parallax Propeller chip and they’ve now released essential files that allow you to create your own functional replica badge.
Links have been provided for the schematic, firmware, and code examples using the badge’s LEDs and the on-board VGA, mouse and keyboard expansion capabilities (pictured above).
Via the Parallax Propeller forum.
A while ago we heard about some new PIC microcontrollers with a tiny bit of integrated logic, a CPLD-lite that can replace a few external logic chips. This app note shows how to make a button debouncer with the peripheral.
In this application note, a PIC10F322 is being used to implement a delay block/debouncer. The delay can be set between 2us and 193us. This can be used effectively as a noise discriminator, or for switch debouncing.
We continue to prep for the New York Global Geek Tour. We’re trying to get Alpha One Labs on the geek tour. Acknowledgements went out to everyone who asked about the geek and food crawl. If you plan to come, let us know soon to get the full list, or watch our Twitter feed for last minute updates.
We requested USB IDs from Microchip for 3 projects. We’re also planing to check out the new PIC18F2550 replacement chips for our projects, so we ordered some samples from Microchip.
App note posts were prepared, and scheduled for this weekend. We also worked on some tutorials for next week. We designed the 3D model for Monday.
Schazamp is making a community order of Bus Pirate v4 Sick of Beige PCBs. He decided to use Seeed Studio’ss cheap PCB service and hack together 4 Bus Pirates on one 10x10cm PCB. He hit a little snag with combining the gerbers, but Ernie helped him out.
Since the Bus Pirate uses our DP6037 standard PCB size, any project on that size board can be assembled in this fashion to get 40 boards for $25! Really!?! We remember getting 5 copies from Bulgaria for $100. Uphill both ways. And we liked it, cause we thought it was cheap!
There’s a downside: you have to cut the boards out of a panel yourself. No pretty edges without some extra elbow grease.
Via the forum.
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 a every week:
Continue reading “Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters”
If you need to do RF related computations on a regular basis, now there’s an app for that! Freescale has released their FREE RF Engineering Tools App V1.0. “The RF Engineering Tools app is a compilation of calculators and converters that can assist the typical RF designer, university student, professor and other members of the RF community in the execution of a variety of design and analysis activities. The calculator list includes a PCB microstrip impedance calculator and both cascaded third-order intercept point and cascaded noise figure analyses of multi-stage RF designs calculators. The converter list includes a common length conversion tool, a dBm-to-watts/watts-to-dBm tool and a polar-to-rectangular/rectangular-to-polar converter.”
The Apple version is compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod Touch (3rd-generation), iPod Touch (4th-generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 4.2.5 or later and can be found on their app store. The Android version is compatible with all Android 2.2+ OS phones and can be found on Google play.
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?
In July we mentioned that Microchip was getting ready to release replacements for the famous PIC18F2550 and PIC18F4550 microcontrollers, and now they are available for sampling.
The PIC18F2/45K50 family is pin to pin comparable with the older series, and are also capable of running at 5V. The price has gone down considerably, as the new series is 40-45 percent cheaper. The new family also features a USB precision integrated oscillator, enabling you to build USB projects without the need of external oscillators.
Filmed today’s Workshop Video, and continued to prepare for the Global Geek Tour New York.
Designed the Sick of Biege case for the Bus Pirate v4c and sent the design files to Seeed Studio’s cheapie laser cutting service. Once we test out this design it should go into production. We also found some interesting app notes for the coming weekend posts.
Adafruit shows how to accurately design footprints in Eagle. The process imports the mechanical drawing into Eagle, and the footprint is traced over this template. It’s best used for mechanical parts – connectors, buttons, jacks, etc – that have complicated footprint designs.
You can also check out our guide to building simple footprints in Eagle, as well as our other Eagle tutorials.
Easy Pulse is a heart rate monitor using an IR LED and a light detector:
Easy Pulse provides a reflective IR sensor with necessary instrumentation circuit to illustrate the principle of photoplethysmography as a noninvasive technique for measuring heart rate. In order for this sensor to work, the fingertip should be placed gently over the sensor and be kept still. The sensor may also be wired to the board through a 4-pin jumper and header pins.
We’re getting ready for the Global Geek Tour of New York. For those of you who can’t join us at the World Maker Faire, here’s a quick logic analyzer demo using a single block of the Magnificent Nixie Thing we’re tinkering with.
Each nixie module has 2 tubes and control circuitry based on new old stock Soviet driver chips. Two nixie drivers are connected to a 74HCT595 serial to parallel output chip. The setup is driven via a simple Arduino sketch that increments the numbers shown on the tubes.
A logic analyzer is a miraculous debugging tool that records invisible electrical signals and shows them on a screen. This is a life saver when you can’t figure out why a circuit isn’t working.
In this case we tap the Logic Sniffer into the wires between the Arduino and the nixie module. It records the signals and displays them as a graph on the computer screen.
The signal here decodes to 01000100. Given the schematic and info from last week, can you tell what digit lights with that value?
No workshop video next week, but the following week look for a new style of geek video from the New York trip. It’s evolving.
You can get the ATX Breakout Board for $14, and the Logic Sniffer for $50 at Seeed Studio.
If you want to know more about the project design, check out our previous video about it.
If’ you’re going to Maker Faire check out our tips and behind the scenes video from Bay Area Maker Faire. And don’t forget your tablecloth!
Microchip has announced the release of a new line of USB 8-bit PICs. The new devices range from 14 to 100 pins with up to 128 KB of Flash. According to the announcement, sampling should begin in early October. All feature internal clock sources with the 0.25% clock accuracy necessary for USB communication eliminating the need for an external crystal. Additionally, all three families are eXtreme Low Power compliant, with power consumption down to 35 µA/MHz Active and 20 nA in Sleep mode.
You can download the 18 page PDF description from Microchip for more information.
Vladimir via the contact form.
NXP released these posters with images of all the SMD packages they use. It could be an easy way for you to quickly see how an unfamiliar package looks.
Clicking on the package in the PDF document to bring up a page with mechanical design files. There are two posters – one for more common packages with leads, and another with lead-less packages.
We’re in high gear preparing for the New York Global Geek Tour. We continue soldering projects for display at Maker Faire New York.
We’re finalizing the Open Hardware Summit presentation. Cleaning up the workshop for tomorrow’s video.
In hardware design we played around calculating the sense and load resistor values for the INA138 current sense monitor.
Protostack donated a $100 gift voucher to the Open 7400 Competition. Get your entry in and this and other cool hardware can be yours.
Protostack is an online hobby electronics store with boards, microcontrollers, and other hardware needed to get you started with electronics projects.
The ATmega328 Development Kit contains everything you need for a basic ATmega328 circuit. It includes a 28 pin AVR development board, ATmega328-PU Microcontroller, power supply components, and more.
The development board is 5″ x 3.7″ (127 x 93.98mm), is made of 1.6mm FR4 and has clean routed edges. It has 6 mounting holes and conforms to the full size Protostack form factor. This allows it to be stacked with other full size and half size Protostack boards.
Continue reading “Open 7400 prize: $100 gift voucher from ProtoStack”
Proper soldering iron maintenance and soldering techniques required to get a perfect solder joint every time.
Via PCBheaven.
Tom built a PID controlled electric smoker. A closed clay pot with a PID controlled hot plate inside heats to a constant temperature. Bits of wood tossed on the hot plate make the smoke.
Via the forum.
Lattice Semi is offering the iCEblink40 Evaluation Kits for $19 for a limited time. The iCEblink40 boards feature the ultra low density iCE40 FPGA and come in two versions, the iCEblink40-HX1K and the iCEblink40-LP1K Evaluation Kits which differ in the number of I/O pins. Both boards offer 1280 logic look up tables and 64K bits of on-chip memory, as well as 1Mbit of SPI Flash memory, capacitive touch buttons, LEDs and access to all user I/Os.
Lattice is also offering the MachXO2 Pico Development Kit for a limited time at a price of $29. This kit features the MachXO2 LCMXO2-1200ZE device, 1 Mbit SPI Flash, I2C temperature sensor, an expansion header for JTAG, SPI, I2C and GPIO interfaces, an LCD display and capacitive touch sense buttons.
hak8or via the contact form.
The New York Global Geek tour runs from September 26th (Wednesday) until the 30th (Sunday). If you’re in town for the Maker Faire or Open Hardware Summit and you’d like to join us for a tasty food crawl (Wednesday) or a tour of NYC electronics stores (Friday) please contact us for more info. Full schedule follows below, and latest updates will be on the wiki. Continue reading “Global Geek Tour New York schedule”
