This week we’re giving away two OSH Park prize packs featuring:
These are the famous purple PCBs from Laen’s OSH Park PCB service. We got a handful of freebies at a party at Macetech’s place during Maker Faire San Francisco. Leave a comment on this post with a project idea, or the reason why you want one, and this board could be yours on Monday.
Uwe wrote to us about the counterfeit chips used in US Military hardware. It turns out that the ice detection system on a Boeing P-8 Poseidon was defective. The suspected culprits are used, and refurbished parts that were sold as new.
remember the stories about ATmega328 fakes/duds about 2 years ago … when Seeed and others sold Seeeduinos and Freeduinos with ATmega168s and Arduinos with ATmega328 were hard to get?
Check out this story on defensetech.org. In particular the pics at the bottom ;)
Via the contact form.
We finished up packing, and upgrading the firmware on the latest hardware we’ll be taking with us to Singapore Maker Faire. The picture above was taken on a brand new Emirates A380, which is taking us to Singapore, over Dubai.
Bus Pirate demo board v5 firmware finally got moving again, after a I2C slave bulk-read bug kept us busy for 2 days.
We added 2, and 3 pin PCB mounted terminal blocks to out Eagle part library.
This is an Arduino shield intended for robotics prototyping. It features a DC/DC power supply, a sonar obstacle sensor, and a IR remote control receiver.
The idea behind this post is to bring together some robot designs and trasform them in a new device with new hardware and standard software (arduino of course) and so easier use.
From the comments on our earlier DIY BGA soldering teardown post, JesseJ points out the poison via effect that will also break the connection to the BGA.
Image above is from the previous post, depicting the capillarity effect where a via sucks the ball of solder in, and prevents contact to the BGA.
Just as a comment on the ‘other side of the coin’ when manufacturing an IC, vias can present an opposite problem with the same result. If all moisture isn’t ‘baked’ out of the wafer before the vias are processed, it is possible for some moisture to be ‘out-gassed’ at the via site breaking the metal via tube – also resulting in a poor/broken connection. This failure is sometimes called a ‘poison via’ and is the opposite of the capillary action on the PCB via, with the same result. Whooda thunk!
Via the comments.
Laser cut acrylic cases are super popular because they look cool, they’re easy to customize, and cheap to make. This tutorial shows how customize our simple Sick_of_Beige Sick of Beige case design to fit your own project. If you start with our standard PCB templates you can get your project into a case with minimal hassle.
Not everyone has a laser cutter, but there’s cheap online services and your local hackerspace might have one. We’ll show you what we do to order laser cut acrylic from Seeed Studio. Continue reading below.
Continue reading “Customizing Sick of Beige cases for laser cutting”
This video displays the work of eight computer and electrical engineers constructing a Wifi repeater-deploying tread robot as part of a senior design project at Northeastern University. The project was constructed at Artisan’s Asylum located in Somerville, MA.
The beast above is a robotic system intended to be operated remotely in hazardous areas where network infrastructure is scarce. The robot is controlled over a WiFi network that originates on the robot and is extended by dropping the black repeater units on its back.
Visit their website for more details.
Via PC World.
AVR based USB website hit counter, displays the hit count on a 8 digit 7-segment display.
This is a USB Physical Hit Counter. This version requires one MCU to communicate between PC and 7-segments display driver.I decided using AVR microcontroller and this is my first AVR project.The purpose of this project still same as previous version.Therefore,it used to count and display the total page hits on any website instead of using only general scripts such as PHP,Java,CGI etc.
Via Hacked Gadgets.
Giorgos started a series of tutorials on remote control signals. First one covers common protocols, and IR modulation basics.
I will explain some essential and widely used IR protocols including the Phillips RC5/6 and the Sony SIRC protocol. But first of all, there is something very important to explain. Many people tend to confuse the protocol and the modulation. I first wrote this article as part of the RC5 protocol, but since it became that long i decided to make a separate page.
If you like to play around with remote control signals, you can pick up our USB IR Toy v2 from Seeed for for $22.05, including world wide shipping.
Via PCB heaven.
Tomorrow we’ll post a tutorial about designing your own custom laser cut acrylic case, then it’s off to Singapore for a Global Geek Tour of the electronics markets and hackerspace. Check for live tweets from the market tour on Friday, and Maker Faire coverage all weekend. Worthy tweets will be moved to the blog for the Twitter haters.
Today we recorded a workshop video with some stories from the “first season” of the Global Geek tour. That will go up Thursday as normal while we’re sitting in an airport in Dubai.
A big box of laser cut case tests and giveaway goodies from Seeed arrived. We’ll have a Seeed giveaway after a Microchip/Digilent giveaway that’s coming up in August.
Bus Pirate Demo Board v5 firmware was stuck in first gear today, as we tried to get the I2C EEPROM emulation to work. Today’s end result, single and bulk writing is ready, while reading is completely broken.
Phalox built a Nokia LCD Backpack free PCB. This is a small color display for which we made a USB controllable backpack. Unfortunately we were never able to source the screens themselves so this project was discontinued, and the boards sold at cost.
Today I got already half of the components together to build this project. I was lucky enough to scavenge some LCD’s from old nokia phones, but the connector was a bigger problem! I had to remove that one from the original PCB. A hot air gun did the trick (but it was hard not to damage the connector).
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.
Via the forum.
Trey German from TI write: “We just announced the C2000 LaunchPad today and I thought it might be a nice addition to your blog. Its a sister board to the MSP430 LaunchPad and is pin compatible so boosterpacks will work with any launchpad. The board costs $17 and includes an isolated high speed USB debugger and 60MHz F28027 Piccolo device.”
opcode also wrote to inform us of a community forum related to this board at c2kcentral.
Via the contact form.
INA219 is a cool IC that measures voltage and current trough a shunt resistor, and relays the information over I2C. It provides the multiple of the two values, thus enabling easy power measurement. Opossum used it along with a Nokia 5110 LCD and a MSP430 LaunchPad to build a nice power-meter.
Via 43-oh.
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:
Today we added two relatively hard-to-solder parts to our library. Both come in QFN lead-less packages.
First is the Texas Instrument’s TPS6120x DC/DC converter (pictured above) with an integrated switch. The second is the Micrel KSZ8851SN embedded Ethernet controller (pictured below).
Meseta from Universal Air wrote in response about the development board market, and give a few tips on how to differentiate your boards from the rest. Read the full article below.
Yes, that’s a tough decision. Devepment boards are a very niche market, there are few customers and there’s a growing list of competitors, you really have to work hard to make your product stand out from the rest. When we approached Sparkfun with our Forebrain product, they basically told us that we did not differentiate ourselves from their existing products.
David Croft writes: “Wanted to let you know about a festival that may interest some of your European readers – Electromagnetic Field taking place at the end of August for hackers and makers.”
According to the emfcamp website, the event is a festival for anyone interested in “3D printing, DIYBio, knitting, electronics, Internet culture, space, lockpicking, homebrewing, robots, UAVs, mind hacking, radio, or pretty much anything else you can think of.” It will occur in Pineham Park, Milton Keynes, UK, from Friday August 31, 2012 through Sunday September 2, 2012.
Go to the emfcamp.org for details and to register.
Via the contact form.
Today was a whole lot of preparing for the Singapore Maker Faire. We ran through the FAQ and Get your stuff made presentations. Rounded up software. Tomorrow demos need to be tested fully. Don’t forget the tablecloth. We regret not looking into audio recording options earlier. A Zoom H4n is suddenly on the wishlist.
Work continues on the Bus Pirate demo board v5 firmware. We fixed the protocol and device jumper setup, and fixed up the I2C ADC mode.
We’re also doing a survey of ARM chips. What’s your favorite chip and toolchain?
Exapod ported TV-B-Gone, the universal TV off button, to the tiny PIC12F1840. He used the free version of the Hi-Tech compiler so the optimizations leave a lot to be desired, but the code only uses 17% of program memory. The prototype was made on a protoboard and an SOIC packaged PIC.
Via the forum.
Kehribar released the v1.1 beta firmware and software for the Little Wire AVR multi-tool. He added support for the 1-wire protocol, made the I2C, SPI, and the AVR debug console interfaces more robust. Other features include new 3 channel pulse-width modulator, software controlled internal pullup resistors, andPIC24F series programming capability.
