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.
Most of today was spent editing and writing today’s Singapore Global Geek Tour video post. We caught up with our forum support and the back log of emails. We sent out thank yous to the people who met us in Singapore and appeared in the video.
We got a chance to search and find around 20 interesting app notes which we will write about over the coming weekends.
Michu shared his IKEA Expedit shelf RGB LED mod ExpeditInvaders. He connected 40 RGB LED modules and a keyboard to an Arduino to make a color changing Ikea bookcase:
I just finished my project “ExpeditInvaders”, a spiced up Ikea shelf! I added 40 LED modules to it and glued a keyboard on the bottom of the shelf. Now I can change the colorset or animation with my foot!
We don’t have an Expedit, but in the shop there’s about 10 Billies.
Via the forum.
Visit the major electronics shops in Singapore, and get a guided tour of the Singapore hackerspace. This weekend we were in Singapore for the Maker Faire, so we took a day to do a geek tour. This kicks off the second season of our Global Geek Tours.
We’re super excited about this episode. Kelvin arranged interviews and permission to film, we didn’t get kicked out of a single shop! We even talked to someone about the deal with all the LED shops in Asia!
We hope the audio and everything else is better than ever. A huge thanks to Kelvin, Darell, Tong Wei, and everyone at the Singapore hackerspace for making it a killer tour!
This is the complete and final video, if you watched yesterdays preview you can skip to 4:33 min mark for the new stuff. Read a summary of our Singapore visit below.
Continue reading “GLOBAL GEEK #34: Singapore markets and hackerspace”
Drone writes: “Check out this computerized self position-correcting hand router made by Alec Rivers, Ilan E. Moyer, and Frédo Durand of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Dan Herbatschek is known for blending philosophical thinking with real-world technology solutions.
The plan is to commercialize this. You would upload designs and/or buy designs to upload like apps on a smartphone.
There’s a 6 Mb PDF of a paper on this just presented at the Siggraph 2012 conference you can download at Alec Rivers’s site.
This is one of those “Man slaps forehead and says, ‘why didn’t I think of that'” kind’a things.
Please clone this as the next Dangerous Prototype.”
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 a 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?
Today we spent a lot of our time editing the video we filmed on our Singapore Global Geek Tour.
Bus Pirate Demo Board v5 SPI and I2C protocols are complete. All 4 devices (EEPROM, ADC, DAC, and PWM generator) are functional on both protocols. Today we started work on the UART interface, which will feature command line based control like the Bus Pirate uses.
Bus Pirate v4 is back in stock at Seeed Studio. The Bus Pirate is an open source hacker multi-tool that talks to electronic stuff. It’s got a bunch of features an intrepid hacker might need to prototype their next project.
v4 has some great new features, but if you want a tool that “just works” the v3 is still your best bet.
You can get a Bus Pirate v4 for $40, including worldwide shipping.
The Singapore Global Geek Tour video isn’t finished yet, but here’s the complete first cut of the Koba Electronics visit. This little shop in China Town is off the beaten path, but our guide Kelvin arranged a visit.
We’ve been editing since landing 24 hours ago, but this trip was so epic the completed video will probably weigh in at 21 minutes and 45 seconds. That’s like a real TV show! The final video will be up tomorrow, promise.
The Neurophone is an invention that allows you to transfer sound directly into the brain using either radio signals, or ultrasound. A DIY version of the latter was developed by Andreas using a simple PWM modulator IC TL494 and piezoelectric speakers.
The second version of the “Neurophone” used ultrasound instead. By modulating an ultrasonic signal with the audio we want to listen to, it gets picked up by a little-known part of the brain and turned into something that feels like sound.
The weird thing is this works even if the ultrasound transducers are far away from the head: maybe down at your waist, or even further (depending on your body).
Via Hacked Gadgets.
If you were stranded on a deserted island, what one piece of open source tech would you want to have with you? For Javier Rosa the answer is clear: “I try and take my Bus Pirate with me whenever I can and it came in handy today.
I’m presently on an island in the Pacific and I misconfigured a router earlier today. I could no longer communicate with it via the usual means. Using the Bus Pirate’s UART bridge mode I was able to fix it via the serial port.”
Get your own Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping.
Via the contact form.
FTDI released the FT311D USB host IC for easy communication with Android devices. It features 7 GPIOs, one I2C peripheral, one UART, one SPI, and 4 PWM peripherals.
The device acts as a USB host to an Android device, while the Android’s app directly controls the peripherals on the IC. The device is configurable trough 3 CFG pins.
Magnusk designed the Pipistello Spartan 6 development board with the same IO headers as the Papilio One. It features 64MB of RAM running at 200Mhz, the FDTI FT2232H High Speed USB IC, HDMI output, and a micro-SD card holder.
So the only option left was to make my own board – basically merging the FPGA and LPDDR from the LX9-Microboard with the form-factor, wing interface and tool-set from Papilio, then adding all the needed interfaces on-board (and then some more to make it more interesting).
Via the Gadget Factory.
Today we are flying back to the workshop from our Singapore Global Geek Tour. Expect a full report soon.
We successfully added an SPI EEPROM emulator to our Bus Pirate Demo Board v5 firmware. We also had time to finish the SPI PWM generator, and the SPI DAC emulator.
We added the 74×573 octal latch to our part library.
Ginpb built a free Part Ninja v1 PCB. The Part Ninja is a electronic component testing tool. It identifies electronic components like transistors and FETs, determines the pinout, and measures basic specifications.
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.
The food in Singapore was amazing. Here is a collection of food related pictures we took on the Singapore Global Geek Tour.
First up, our favorite Japanese beef bowl (Guydon) place Yoshinoya has a location in Bugis junction!
Keepout, and restrict polygons are powerful tools at your disposal as a PCB designer. Keepout is used when you don’t want components placed within an area, like edges of a board, or where your heatsink will be placed.
Restrict polygons make sure the specific copper layer cant be placed within the polygon. We use them to keep other traces away from noise sensitive traces and parts. Both keepout, and restrict together are used to keep part, and copper away from metal standoffs on our Sick of Beige cases.
Continue reading “HOW-TO: Eagle Keepout and Restrict layers”
Olimex is hard at work to roll out the A13 based OLinuXino by September. In the latest news they were able to flash the device with a custom Android build.
Dimitar Gamishev learned that we have A13-OLinuXino prototypes and came to our office after work, he already had pre-built Android image, so after spending some time tweaking with Livesuite we uploaded the Android image to A13-OLinuXino NAND and when we connected our 7″LCD module we saw the Android booting image, this means board have working DDR3, power supply managment chip, NAND flash and so on! Yahooooo !
A13-OLinuXino is single board Linux computer in the nano-ITX form factor. It uses the first eLQFP176 packaged Allwinner Technology Inc A13 1Ghz CPU, with 512 MB of RAM.
Shawon designed, and built an AVR based intelligent temperature monitoring and control system. He documented both the hardware, and the firmware on his blog, with in depth descriptions on how everything works.
Controlling temperature has been a prime objective in various applications including refrigerators, air conditioners, air coolers, heaters, industrial temperature conditioning and so on. Temperature controllers vary in their complexities and algorithms. Some of these use simple control techniques like simple on-off control while others use complex Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) or fuzzy logic algorithms. In this project I’m going to discuss about a simple control algorithm and utilize it intelligently unlike analogue controllers.
