Christopher Armenio writes, “The embdSocial team just finished our 2nd ‘Project Weekend’ and we delivered some pretty awesome projects! Thanks for checking them out.”
Check below the fold for project videos, links to details and more!
Continue reading “embdSocial team project weekend roundup”
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?
As a response to yesterday’s Workshop Video on how we stock our parts, Alvaro made a video of his own storage system. He predominately uses portable boxes, which have 4 removable compartmentalized containers.
We also talked with Alvaro at the Bay Area Maker Fair 2012, and his wireless friend finder project.
The workshop video always sucks up a whole day, this one way longer than normal to edit though. Learn about the parts we stock and why.
Routing of the soldering practice badge continues today. We set the design using 3 ‘595 shift registers, and one ULN2003 Darlington array. Two ‘595s control power to 15 columns of LEDs, while the ULN2003 in conjunction with the third ‘595 sinks the 8 available rows, one row at the time. We also fixed some silkscreen issues we had with the 2×5 shrouded header in our Eagle part library.
Documentation on the Bus Pirate v4 LCD adapter started today. Only a few action pictures and some last minute editing remains.
Today we collected information on NPN(BDX33 above, pinout: BCE), and PNP(BDX34 below, pinout: BCE) Darlington transistors with the Processing app for the Part Ninja. These Darlingtons have an integrated clamp diode. This adds an additional conduction path as compared to normal BJTs, thus throwing off the test logic. With this info we will soon incorporate part recognition for them as well.
Seeed Studio started selling Makeblock, a new Arduino controlled modular robotics platform. They are made of aluminum, and come in many modular shapes you can design your robot with:
Makeblock is made of strong, hardened aluminum which is able to support the weight of an adult and more. In conjunction with a more durable material, Jasen and Alex, have developed a unique design utilizing threaded slots to allow you to put screws anywhere along the beam, eliminating the need for nuts and providing unlimited options in placement. They also use industrial standard components, motors, links, timing belts, gear and rotational and linear bearings to bring flexibility to this system. Let’s not forget that the kits are 100% compatible with all Arduinos/Seeeduinos and the whole Grove Prototyping System as well!
Want to test your strength at home, instead of only at carnivals? Well Bertho is designing a updated version of the popular carnival strength test using electro-magnets to propel the ball. You can easily rig the game so you are the only one that can ring the ball.
I have been working on a game-idea for some time and now it simply must be made. The game “High Striker”, done in electronic form, using a ball in a transparent tube that is propelled in a coil-gun style. However, one coil cannot get the ball to ring the bell and a second coil must be activated at the right time with the right power to propel the ball all the way up.
The kit requires lots of acrylic laser cutting, and the cost for a one-off is quite high. If you are interested in this project let Bertho know in the forum, he is looking into making a few.
What parts do you stock, and how do you store them?
In this workshop video we cover:
Sources for most of the parts in the video are available on our master partlist.
Continue below for a short summary of the parts.
Continue reading “WORKSHOP VIDEO: Parts we stock and part storage”
Exapod built a 8×16 ping-pong ball LED matrix display. The ping-pong balls are used as diffusers for green LEDs. Two MAX7219 8bit serial LED drivers control the lights. A PIC18F2553 drives the MAX chips with text received over a Bluetooth module.
I finally finished my 8×16 ping pong ball matrix display, soldering all the boards, the leds, the wires and gluing the ball took me a lot of time. It uses a pic18f2553 to control two max7219, the string to display is sent via bluetooth.
Check out a video of it in action below.
Mikro Elektornika is selling STM32 ARM breakout boards with Ethernet PHY for a reasonable price of $24. While they are intended as replaceable MCU cards for their EasyMX PRO v7 development board, you can also buy them standalone and develop your project around them. They come with either STM32F107, STM32F207, or STM32F407 processors, or as unpopulated boards.
Via the forum.
Here’s an interesting new podcast from our friends at GadgetGangster. It’s known as The Prototypers and covers various subjects of interest to electronics hobbyists. Episode 7 (the most recent) covers hacking smart parking meters with Joe Grand, the Commodore Plus Four and more.
Check it out!
We worked on the updated sales page for the Bus Pirate. You can preview our “work in progress” in the pic above, and notice a slight update to the site-wide banner. The final render of the 3D model for the sales page is currently in progress.
We decided make two versions of the LED Dangerous Prototypes badge. One is driven by a microcontroller and logic ICs, while the other will have all the LEDs connected so we can solder whatever LEDs we need.
Tomorrow there’s a new workshop video. Maybe on the sales pages or Part Ninja application, maybe something on part storage or the open source USB stack.
Zach is working on a RFID project using the RDM6300 RFID to UART module and a PIC 18 development board.
Once I verified that I could receive a single card’s data, I set up a demo with three RFID tags programmed into the PIC so that it would toggle an LED based on which card was swiped.
Source for interfacing the RFID module is posted.
It doesn’t get much simpler than this cardboard case for the Raspberry-Pi. It’s a printable cut-out design that shows you where to cut, bend, and glue to make a simple enclosure.
While this isn’t the most professional looking enclosure for a project, it does provide some protection. We’d like to design DIY cutout cases for some for our projects as too.
Via Raspberry Pi.
This guide shows how to configure and customize the latest version of the JTR-Honken open source USB stack for PIC microcontrollers. The demo will run on most USB-enabled projects from Dangerous Prototypes. Be sure to check the wiki for the latest documentation and downloads.
Many PIC microcontrollers have USB hardware. We use some of these chips in the IR Toy, Bus Pirate v4, Logic Sniffer, LCD Backpack, and more. Microchip provides free code to run the USB hardware, but it can’t be distributed with open source software. This has always been a disappointment to lots of people, and a barrier to using Microchip stuff in open source and education.
Over the last few years forum members wrote and tested an open source alternative. The stack has these features:
All our projects are now running on the most recent version of the USB stack, but there’s never been a simple example and complete documentation. We put together a bare-bones USB to serial echo demo to help get you started with the stack. The example has lots of comments, several pages of documentation, and it can be used as the basis for a new project. It works on many PIC 18Fs and 24Fs right out of the box.
This guide shows how to configure and customize the USB stack. The stack and example code are licensed Creative Commons Attribution, so you can use it pretty much however you want. A huge thanks to Honken, JTR, and many others who contributed bug reports and improvements.
For more details continue reading below.
Continue reading “HOW-TO: Open Source USB stack for PIC microcontrollers”
This is another illustration of the amazing utility of the RTL-SDR and SDR# software. Here proct0r links the output from SDR# to a program known as DSD. DSD is an open source command line program originally coded in C by anonymous for Linux for the purpose of decoding digital protocols via a PC soundcard. Continue reading “Decoding P25 with SDR#, DSD, and RTLSDR”
From the comments on our FTDI’s new X-Series of USB device chips post:
I’ve been using the FT221X. Regarding the leadless package, assembly by hand is doable with the right tools: a hot air rework station such as the Hakko 803B, and either a stencil or a droplet dispenser (or both) for applying the paste — applying paste with nothing more than a simple syringe is out of the question. For a one-off project, the evaluation module is only $20 and is all through-hole.
Continue reading “From the comments: FTDI X-series chip review”
NBitWonder built a free Bus Pirate v3b 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.
Desktop cleanup yielded a few random project files that we added to the SVN.
We’re preparing 2 different sales pages for the Bus Pirate. We’ll post both for feedback, and then randomly display them to determine if one is more effective. Any statistics will be posted on the blog.
The DIY DP Badge is nearing completion, we are still figuring out if we should add logic to the LED matrix, or just connect them all to power, and let people solder the ones they want to light up.
The Part Ninja firmware, and Processing app is now stable under Windows. Under Linux only terminal mode is supported, there seems to be an error in the Processing serial library under Linux.
The Web Platform is now supported by the PIC24 library collection of examples and functions for working with PIC24 hardware peripherals. It features a getting started guide, a library with lots of useful functions, and a simple event driven operating system.
The PIC24 support library supports all the major subsystems of the PIC24: clock configuration, configuration bits, delays, interrupts, digital I/O, timers, serial I/O, SPI, I2C, ECAN, comparators, A/D conversion, FLASH reads/writes, and DMA. An extensive set of examples accompanying the library provide working sample code to guide newcomers to using the library.
Thanks Trev! Via the contact form.
Get an assembled web platform for $40, including worldwide shipping.
A short but helpful tutorial on how to copy parts between libraries in Cadsoft Eagle.
You can also check out some of our Eagle tutorials.
