NEW PROTOTYPE: Sick of Beige basic case v1

Basic case version 1 is a laser cut acrylic case that demonstrates Sick of Beige standard PCB sizes. A handy Eagle template library gives your board the right case dimensions with no hassle.

Version 1 of the basic case is simple, cheap, easy to assemble, and fits our Sick of Beige standard PCB sizes.

The PCB is sandwiched between two laser cut acrylic sheets, and the assembly is held together with screws and standoffs. Sheets extrude 2mm on each side of the PCB they enclose so there’s plenty of reinforcement for the screw holes.

The bottom sheet is usually generic, while the top sheet can be custom cut to fit a specific project.

Seeed has the DP6037 Bus Pirate v3.6 case on sale, as well as the DP6037 blank case for only $3. We hope to have Sick of Beige cases for all our projects soon.

More about the SoB basic case v1 below.

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NEW PROJECT: Sick of Beige standard PCB sizes v1.0

Are you sick of beige project boxes that hide your cool board and hard work? Wouldn’t it be cool if your project was case ready from the first revision?

We worked with case designer David Moberly (dsm) to create a case-friendly PCB footprint for all our projects. We call the specification Sick of Beige v1.0. Just drop a Sick of Beige PCB symbol on an Eagle schematic to get a board with nice rounded edges, mounting holes, and recommendations for connector placement.

The PCB templates come in two shapes, sized to fit the free version of Eagle and the various inexpensive PCB services. Read on for the full specification, or grab the library and get started with standard boards today.

Full specifications for our new standard boards follows. All feedback is welcome.

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WORKSHOP VIDEO #31: Sick of Beige standard PCB templates and cases

Are you sick of beige project boxes that hide your cool board and hard work? Wouldn’t it be cool if your project was case ready from the first revision?

Sick of Beige cases are simple protectors and enclosures for hobby electronics project. Design your project with our standard PCB templates and it’s ready for an enclosure.

Getting the Bus Pirate into a case we like has been a years-long journey. Sample after sample has been nothing but a boring beige box. Sick standard beige cases that hide your project under an ugly veneer. From Tokyo to Seoul to Shenzhen, the same dull containers where projects go to die.

No more! We’re sick of beige. Forum member dsm helped us create a set of standard PCB templates to use with our projects, and a couple simple case designs that match. These square and golden-rectangle shaped templates are designed to fit in the free version of Eagle, and the inexpensive PCB services offered by Seeed Studio and others.

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Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller

This hack was demonstrated by Cody Brocious, a Mozilla software developer, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. At risk are four million hotel rooms secured by Onity programmable key card locks. According to Brocious, who should be scolded for not disclosing the hack to Onity before going public, there is no easy fix: There isn’t a firmware upgrade — if hotels want to secure their guests, every single lock will have to be changed.

The hack in its entirety is detailed on Brocious’s website, but in short: At the base of every Onity lock is a small barrel-type DC power socket (just like on your old-school Nokia phone). This socket is used to charge up the lock’s battery, and to program the lock with a the hotel’s “sitecode” — a 32-bit key that identifies the hotel. By plugging an Arduino microcontroller into the DC socket, Brocious found that he could simply read this 32-bit key out of the lock’s memory. No authentication is required — and the key is stored in the same memory location on every Onity lock.

The paper and slides from Cody’s presentation can be found on his I, Hacker website.

Via ExtremeTech.

RoboBrrd Brain board v2 gEDA design time-lapse video

Watch Erin design RoboBrrd’s Brain board v2 in gEDA from start to finish. RoboBrrd is an interactive robot designed to motivate students by responding to their achievements through chirps and dances. The original brain of the RoboBrrd was an Arduino MEGA, but the latest version will feature a custom Arduino compatible board.

Since redesigning RoboBrrd went so well, the base was eliminated. This meant that the previous version of the RoboBrrd Brain Board was way too gigantic! Luckily, an Arduino does fit into the back of RoboBrrd. It’s a tight squeeze for all directions with all the items I wanted to put on the board.

Making all of the footprints and such was quite tedious and time consuming. Hopefully there will be no mistakes. Slowly getting better at designing boards, but it is still very challenging! Here’s a timelapse video of making the board… it was a lot of work.

Bus Pirate v3.5 free PCB build

David built a free Bus Pirate v3.5 PCB. The Bus Pirate is an open source hacker multi-tool that talks to electronic stuff.

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.

Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.

Via the contact form.

HOW TO: Eagle shortcut keys and scripts

As we picked up some experience with Eagle, we figured out that clicking icons and typing in commands slows down productivity. Eagle’s key-binding features make it faster to do common tasks by pressing a few keys, but for a real kick they can also run scripts. We use a hot-key to run our project export script that builds preview images and BOMs in excel, html, and wiki formats.

This is a short tutorial about our journey into creating key-bindings for common commands. Read below how to create shortcuts in Cadsoft Eagle.

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Installing Metasploit on Raspberry Pi

We like Irongeek’s recipe for installing Metasploit on the Raspberry Pi. He presents a simple straightforward install method to install Metasploit on his board running the Debian “wheezy” public beta.

For those looking for something more, you may want to consider PwnPi, which is a Linux-based penetration testing dropbox distribution for the Raspberry Pi.

Seeed Studio vs ITead Studio PCB service head to head

Florin made a head to head comparison of Seeed and ITead’s inexpensive PCB services. He made the orders with the same design files, on the same day. While the Seeed order came in after 4 weeks, ITead’s came just 15 days after the order was made. The author however suspects it might have been a fluke, since all his earlier orders from ITead took around 4 weeks to complete too.

In Florin’s opinion the quality was identical. In the high resolution pictures it appears that the Seeed boards have better silk screen and drill positioning. This is odd because they came from the same PCB fab unaltered! Perhaps a cheaper service, or just general inconsistency between batches or boards?

Read the full comparison on his blog, along with super hi-res pictures of the boards.

Workshop Update for July 24th, 2012

We ordered a new batch of stickers for the Singapore Maker Faire.

An order of Sick of Beige cases came from Seeed today, so we started preparing for the casing workshop video early.

We continued the case designs for the Bus Blaster v3, and the Part Ninja. The Bus Blaster case is complete, while with the Part Ninja we hit a few snags as much of the PCB needs to be exposed to provide easy access.

Eagle Parts: Serial 1.8” TFT and 2×10 shrouded header update

Lately we’re playing around with a 1.8” serial interface TFT which can be bought from eBay for ~$6. We added it to our Eagle part library.

We also found some errors on the standard Eagle footprint for 2×10 shrouded headers we use in the Bus Blaster v3. Image of the new, fixed shrouded header’s footprint, and schematic symbol are below.

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#FreePCB via Twitter to 2 random RTs

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

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AltOR32: An OpenRISC CPU for small FPGAs

Ultra-Embedded designed a soft core 32bit openRISC CPU with basic ISA functionality for small FPGAs. It fits on the Spartan 3 featured on the Papilio One 250k development board, and comes in pipelined and  multi-cycle versions.

AltOR32 is an OpenRISC 1000 architecture derived RISC CPU targeted at small FPGAs and contains only the most basic ISA features from the OpenRisc project. Instructions & registers relating to Vector, floating-point, 64-bit extensions, MMU & Cache have been omitted. The aim of AltOR32 is to provide a simple 32-bit soft CPU architecture aimed at control applications that can fit in low-end FPGA technology. This architecture re-uses the OpenRisc GNU toolchain hence implements all instructions that cannot be disabled. Anything else is viewed as beyond the scope of this cut-down soft-CPU implementation.

Via the Gadget Factory.

Arduino task scheduler

Brad shared an Arduino library he wrote schedules when specific functions will be executed. The code is open source and available on github.

This library allows you to create a schedule queue of functions to be executed at specified times, on specified intervals.  For example, say you’re trying to log some sensor data and update a display in the same program. With the task scheduler, you can simply write a function to gather sensor data, write a function to update the display, add them to your queue, and let the library handle the rest.

Renesas RL78 promo board meets TI CC3000 WiFi module


If you’re just receiving your Renesas RL78 promo board, here’s an article from the Renesas Rulz blog discussing how to interface it with the LS Research TiWi-SL based TI CC3000 WiFi board.

As the post points out, “The primary hardware issue is level conversion. The RPB is a 5V design and the CC3000 module operates at 3.3V. Communication between the modules happens via SPI. You must also use a linear regulator to power the CC3000 module from a voltage reference on the RPB.”

The WiFi module discussed herein is TI Part No. CC3000TIWISLEM and is available from their estore for $49.00.

NOTE: While the detailed post referred to by Renesas Rulz has been inexplicably deleted we found the complete project source code to go with the above schematic on the TI website.

Via Renesas Rulz.