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:
Free PCB Sunday. The classic. Every week, get free PCBs right here on the blog comments
Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs while you wait for the weekend
Wardy gives some advice on how to improve your schematic and PCB design skills. His advice is to clone consumer products with available schematics. He provides links to a few examples to get you started.
Using a realistic design will confront you with the kind of obstacles that present themselves to the original designers themselves (things like searching for footprints that aren’t in your parts library) and also the more tangible mental exercises such as trying to cram 250 parts (and the many hundreds of traces that interlink them) into 20 square inches of circuit board!
For a less adventurous approach we recommend removing some or all of the traces from the PCB on your favorite open source project, then re-routing them.
Rei Vilo has developed embedXcode, a Xcode 4 template for embedded computing boards, that supports Arduino, chipKIT, MSP430 LaunchPad, LeafLabs Maple and Wiring boards/platforms.
“It relies on a set of modular makefiles, so adding support for a new board/platform is easy. The makefiles can also be used with any standard IDE, for example NetBeans. I hope embedXcode could help developers with a more advanced IDE on OS X.”
Edited Beers in Bunnie’s Workshop video. Please check it out.
Finished the “nixie pile” driver and holder boards, and sent them to Seeed Studio’s PCB service. They’ll be black.
It seems Maker Faire New York acceptance letters went out today, we will be there with Louis from the San Francisco taco crawl and videos, and forum member SQKYbeaver was accepted as well. Hope to see you there!
Speaking of New York Maker Faire – we finally found a place to stay. The main conference hotel at the end of the 7 line in Flushing is close to the Faire but ages from anywhere else. Snoresville. For only 10 bucks more we got a serviced apartment in the East Village near where the Open Hardware Summit will be this year.
When looking for a small switching power supply module at the website of Murata I found this Emicon-Fun! They have some lessons about how capacitors and inductors work.
Of course, as they make caps and coils it’s a bit self promotion but the lessons look quite useful.
Andrew ‘Bunnie’ Huang is a noted open source hardware designer, XBOX hacker, and architect behind the Chumby. He welcomed us into his personal workshop while we were in Singapore for a tour and a few cold Tiger Beers.
First there’s a tour of Bunnie’s workshop that includes highlights like the pile of SMD part reels, BGA re-balling equipment, and redundant internet connection. Bunnie visits the giant parts markets and manufacturing hub in Shenzhen, China at least once a month, so in part two we ask about his experience working in Hua Qiang Bei.
A huge shout out to NASA. By some huge coincidence we met up with Bunnie minutes before the Opportunity RoverCuriosity rover landed on Mars. Not only was the engineering top notch, but the live stream is copyright free so we could include it in the video. Edit: the video erroneously labeled it the Opportunity rover landing, that is incorrect.
This is the final video from Singapore. Normal workshop videos resume next week with the open source lunar lander.
Do you have a favorite open source hacker? Let us know in the comments and we’ll try to have a beer with them the next time we’re in town.
Chris designed this simple 40pin IDE to 40pin ”0.1 header to easily breadboard with his DE0-Nano FPGA development system. While it was designed for the DE0-Nano, any board that uses the 40 pin IDE header can be broken out in this way. He provided in-depth instructions on how to build your own, including the design files.
Here is a light show project from North Street Labs built for the Hippodrome. They built 7 large LED panels that are controlled trough an RS-485 link. Each panel has 86 RGB LEDs and an Arduio controlling them. The build is well documented if you want to try this at home.
Drone sends a link to a repository with 13 years of technical bulletins produced and edited by English Amateur Radio operator John Stockley G8MNY. “Each bulletin is listed by topic and may be downloaded individually in PDF format. Many bulletins cover RF-related topics, but there are a lot of other subjects covered as well. These bulletins are normally distributed via Amateur packet radio networks. The ASCII graphics are quite nostalgic if not downright artful.”
Began plotting the Box of Nixies project. This is the nixie socket holder board for IN12s and IV22s (yes, VFDs actually). A universal driver board will sit behind it and all the other various nixie holders. Boards will probably go out today or tomorrow.
Started cataloging workshop videos on a new wiki page. Episodes now have numbers, based on an arbitrary starting point that seemed like a good S01E01.
A custom mini-site for the 7400 contest should be ready tomorrow once the artwork is in line. We’re also doing some general fixes on the website starting with an update to the blog theme. Changes will be exclusively under the hood until we get to the wiki theme which needs to use space better.
This project is about building a PC-based temperature and relative humidity logger using the chipKIT Uno32 board and the DHT11 sensor. The project setup requires no additional wires (other than the USB cable) and components; the DHT11 sensor is directly plugged into four I/O pins of the Uno32 board and the project is ready to go.
Texas Instruments is set to release a LaunchPad development board for their Stellaris Cortex M4 based DSPs. The release date is set for 25th of September. If your register on their site, you’ll have the ability to pre-order these boards for $5. The cheapie dev-boards just keep on coming.
At the recent DEFCON 20 conference in Las Vegas, Don C. Weber presented this talk on smart meter technology and security. The presentation deals with the optical port found on smart meters, and covers attacks from quick memory acquisition techniques to more complex hardware bus sniffing, as well as how authentication credentials are acquired. Finally, a method for interacting with a meter’s IR port will be introduced to show that vendor specific software is not necessary to probe these meters.
We’ve got a lot more information about the festival up now on the site and wiki – there’s a rapidly-expanding and fascinating list of talks and workshops, and we’ve revealed our lovely camp badge which all campers will get for free. As well as being Arduino-compatible (including the shield pin-out), it includes a LiPoly battery and a 2.4GHz Nordic RF communication module – it’ll be preprogrammed with an on-site game but we’re excited to see what other people will come up with over the course of the weekend.
Qubbeks made a piece of software that lets you play with the FT245R USB to IO IC. It gives you an easy way to interface with electronics. Each pin can be both input and output, thus giving you 8 digital channels to interface with.
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:
Hate Twitter and Facebook? Free PCB Sunday is the classic PCB giveaway. Catch it every Sunday, right here on the blog
Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs will be your friend for the weekend
