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:
Eric, the designer of the VideoOverlayShield now on sale at Seeed sent us this mail.
Just wanted to write and say thanks for all the work you do at Dangerous Prototypes you and your team have been a big inspiration to me.
Read about his project manufacturing at Seeed experience below.
Continue reading “From the mail bag: Open source projects inspire!”
Free PCBs are being mailed. We’re trying really hard to find a way to go to Singapore’s first Maker Faire at the end of the month. Our USB talk was accepted to the Open Hardware Summit so we’re working on the presentation now.
In response to Dave’s suggestions we made modifications to our Bus Pirate LCD adapter v3 and v4 boards. More to the point we added an option 2×8 LCD header footprint on the LCD. We also we brushed up the documentation for the LCD adapters.
Schazamp finalized his USB power supply. It features the MCP1824S linear voltage regulator, a PTC resettable fuse, and an ON-NONE-ON SPDT switch. You can chose the output from either the 5v USB line or the voltage regulator.
Via the forum.
Today’s 3D model is a small revision of the Bus Pirate LCD adapter v3. We added an optional 2×8 HD44780 header footprint to the board, as per EEVblog’s suggestion.
Check out our tutorial on how to build 3D models from Cadsoft Eagle board files, as well as the tutorial on how to render life like images with Kerkythea.
The models will be published in the Dangerous Prototypes 3D warehouse collection. They are also uploaded to our SVN. You can find them inside the “art” folders in the respective project folders.
Get an assembled Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors. Get an LCD adapter for $9.
Dave over at EEVblog tested an HD44780 LCD, and he used the Bus Pirate and LCD adapter in his demo. In the video he works with an LCD that has a 2×8 header, but the LCD adapter only supports a 1×16 type. Here’s a prototype LCD adapter board updated with an optional 2×8 LCD header. Now it should be possible to test nearly all common HD44780 character displays.
Currently version 3 of the LCD adapter is on sale at Seeed, an upcoming batch will feature this unpopulated optional header as well.
See the Bus Pirate in the EEVblog after the break.
Get an assembled Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors. Get an LCD adapter for $9.
Via the forum.
Continue reading “Bus Pirate on EEVblog and 2×8 connector support on LCD adapter”
Ken from OverEngineered writes us about his recent efforts in reverse engineering,
I recently reverse-engineered the security system installed in my house and re-implemented the control board for it using a JeeNode (arduino-compatible with on-board RFM12 radio). Turn your whole house around with custom home renovation toronto.
I created a post about the reverse-engineering here.
And another post about a demo of the wireless Security Node with host interface UI. The code and schematics are posted on my GitHub page.
Via the contact form.
Squonk shared a small tutorial on how to make ‘3D Warehouse‘-like previews for your SketchUp 3D Models. It involves installing and using the SketchUp Web Exporter plugin:
This tool will create in the given directory a collection of JPEG pictures and an HTML file containing the JavaScript code to animate the panorama, as well as a ZIP file containing the above files for convenient deployment on a website.
Via the forum.
Erdabyz finalized his Arduino-based line following robot. The design is open source and you can download the project files in the forum. He has 20 board which he’d sell for $3.5 +shipping.
Via the forum.
Here is a design note from Liner Technology explaining how using their LT5400 matched resistor networks in your analog design can improve it’s precision by an order of magnitude.
The actual performance of precision amplifiers and ADCs is often difficult to achieve since data sheet specifications assume ideal components. Carefully matched resistor networks, such as those supplied by the LT5400, enable precision matching orders of magnitude better than discrete components, ensuring data sheet specifications are met for precision ICs.
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. Our PCBs are made through Seeed Studio’s Fusion board service.
This week two random commenters will get a coupon code for the free PCB drawer tomorrow morning. Pick your own PCB.
You get unlimited free PCBs now – finish one and we’ll send you another!
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times every week:
[nwazet has developed Nutshell, a visual screen designer for their Netduino Go Touch Display module. It’s purpose is to make the design of Netduino display module UI’s easier and more intuitive than coding it up line by line. You can use Nutshell without installing anything since the tool runs JavaScript in your web browser. Just copy/paste the resulting code in Visual Studio when you’re done!
The visual design tool for building UI’s is open source, with the source code available on [nwazet’s GitHub page. The Touch Display’s module schematic and firmware can be found here.
Visit Coding4Fun for more information and video tutorials on using Nutshell.
Here is a reference guide from NXP for the DSP library made for LPC17xx, and LCP13xx microcontrollers. You can download the library here.
The DSP library has been developed as a commonly used set of DSP functions optimized for the NXP Cortex-M3 LPC1700 and LPC1300 family products. Most functions have been implemented in Thumb-2 assembler unless there was little or no performance benefit in doing so.
The library is supplied as a static library project with source code in LPCXpresso (Code Red), Keil and IAR versions, and can also be linked into any ARM-EABI tool chain as a binary library
Atmel describes their DataFlash memory chips and how to interface with them:
The DataFlash is perfectly suited for digital voice-, image-, code- and data-storage applications, especially where low power consumption is required. In these storage applications, the DataFlash’s small page size not only makes it easier to manipulate data, it also increases storage efficiency.
USB Infrared Toy v2 is back in stock at Seeed Studio. You can use it as a remote control with your computer, view infrared signals on a logic analyzer, capture and replay remote control buttons.
You can get IR Toy v2 for $22.05, including world wide shipping.
The Hackers On Plant Earth conference, known as HOPE Number 9, is currently underway in New York City. The conference runs through July 15 and features speakers on a wide array of topics of interest to the hacker and open source community. The conference is sponsored by 2600 Magazine and occurs biennially in even numbered years.
The HOPE team is streaming live audio and video from the conference on their Radio Statler website. The site also has an accumulating archive of select conference proceedings so you can check out any recorded presentations you missed. (Note that the video stream is a live feed of the Radio Statler operations, and not live video of the conference presenters; the archives are select audio recordings of talks previously presented and interviews with presenters.)
If you didn’t make it to HOPE this year, you’ll want to keep an ear on the Radio Statler site this weekend!
A while back we wrote an app note post about the Capacitive Sensing Module available on some PIC microcontrollers. As a follow up we are posting a guide to the CSM module written by electronicsbasecom in the forum.
Recently I started to work with mTouch CSM module. It sounded like extremely interesting and high performance hardware to work with. It sounded right! :) there are countless applications for use of this hardware. Touch pad, proximity sensors, readout of capacitive sensors,extreme precision capacitance measurement, ultra small capacitance change detection, soil moisture, skin moisture measurement are just some of them.. But then I started to search for examples and I was surprised because there wasn’t any!!!! At least not ones that was helpfull.. That is why I made this complete guide for capacitive sensing using excellent Microchip CSM module inside some of them microcontrollers.
Continue reading the full guide below. For more information check out the author’s blog.
Continue reading “App note: More about capacitive touch sensing”
We played with the site theme a bit. There’s a temporary theme on the wiki right now. We sent a few projects out for a quote, including an acrylic case for the ATX power supply. WordPress, plugin, and server updates went smoothly today.
In hardware design we fixed the little spelling mistake on the Part Ninja board, it’s committed to SVN under v1d. We made a new Eagle wiki on assigning shortcut keys, and made a new part for our library, a small 3mmx6mm SMD button.
The secret project firmware is completely documented now, and is ready for some alpha testing. We also expanded the blog schedule wiki, to better describe various feature posts we do on the blog.
Frank designed, and built a Laptop controlled keyboard, and mouse emulator for his Raspberry Pi. It is designed around two microcontroller with USB device capability.
One is connected to a Laptop, from which it receives it’s mouse and keyboard data, while the other is connected to the Raspberry Pi to which it emulates a mouse, and keyboard, parsing the data received from the laptop connected uC.
Via the forum.
Kmmankad designed and built an Ethernet adapter for his EzPSoC3 Cypress PSoC3 development board. It features the Ethernet to serial IC ENC28J60 and an open source stack he has written, that is available at github.
Via the forum.
