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:
Check out The Longhorn Engineer’s Maker Faire project: the 3D printed NES portable. This is basically the Nintendo Top loader board placed inside a custom 3D printed case, with a Play Station Portable screen integrated into it.
You can also watch Parker talk about it in our video about the Bay Area Maker Faire 2012 projects.
Via the contact form.
Asarli shared his Bus Pirate v3.5a SOIC PCB build. These boards were designed with the larger SOIC PIC microcontrollers, making them easier to solder for beginners.
Get an assembled Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Via the forum.
We previously posted on Franz Enzenhofer’s project providing unofficial Google image search by drawing. Now Franz writes to inform us of a new project he coded up over the last weekend. He says, “last weekend I coded another prototype app Lalo.li, basically a 100% client side short voice message service. Some background information and code can be found on my GitHub page.”
This is a fun app with potential for both pranks and practical uses. Give it a try. Our tests worked well on Windows XP with Firefox, but wouldn’t function on an idevice using Safari.
Via the contact form.
We commited a patch to the SPIsniffer utility for the Bus Pirate that fixes an error with correct port speed settings on some systems. We also started work on some landing, and sales pages for the Bus Pirate.
A bunch of LEDs were added to the Dangerous Prototypes solder practice badge.
Part Ninja Processing app was giving us grief with the serial connection. It kept getting stuck, so we overhauled the communication protocol.
The Little-Wire, TinyAVR based multi-tool has entered production at Seeed Studios. After some initial difficulties with production setup, the first run of Little Wires has started production last week.
Last Friday they said me that they’ll start the production immediately at that day. I’m waiting … I hope at most at the end of this week, it will be available.
I’m seeing that at fulfillment manufacturing, you almost have no power over the company. They might have another important project and yours could be delayed. But, it is better than nothing. Without them it would be very hard to market this product globally.
Via the forum.
Here is a review of the Raspberry Pi from the forum:
This is my “home” forum for embedded stuff, as the community here is good. Though I note Raspberry Pi (here forward R-Pi) has its own forum (I’m teholabs there).
I wonder how many persons here got one? I ordered on day 1 (March) and just got mine this week… Eeppp. But I’m sure they will catch up in not too too long.
So I have some mixed feelings about R-Pi, on the one hand a lot of the fun of doing embedded system stuff for me is to see how much you can do with very little. People laugh at me when I tell them I have 512 bytes of memory for a project.
Read the full review below.
Today’s 3D model is the breakout board for the PIC32 microcontrollers that come in PDIP packages. It features a 3.3v power supply, quartz crystal, and a reset button, while all the leftover pins are broken out.
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
According to an article posted on BoingBoing, Fedora Linux has agreed to pay Microsoft what amounts to an access tax which will allow Fedora products to run on MS locked down hardware.
A quiet announcement from the Fedora Linux community signals a titanic shift in the way that the computer market will work from now on, and a major threat to free/open operating systems. Microsoft and several PC vendors have teamed up to ensure that only operating systems bearing Microsoft’s cryptographic signature will be able to boot on their hardware, meaning that unless Microsoft has blessed your favorite flavor of GNU/Linux or BSD, you won’t be able to just install it on your machine, or boot to it from a USB stick or CD to try it out.
Microsoft’s practice is facilitated by the UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which allows a manufacturer to lock down the boot process so that it will only work on their specified conditions. (For an explanation of the UEFI in general, see Sebastian Anthony’s ExtremeTech article.)
We don’t judge Fedora for doing what they felt was necessary to facilitate their operations. However, the implications of Microsoft taking advantage of the UEFI to exclude open source products from being installed on the hardware you own are huge.
Update from the comments:
The Boing Boing article is inaccurate about the $99 going to Microsoft. The actual article that they link to states that the $99 actually goes to Verisign to get a code signing certificate and you can sign as much stuff as you want after that within the validity of the certificate.
Via BoingBoing.
Ytai has been working on the second generation IOIO, a USB development board for Android OS devices. The next version will feature USB on-the-go (OTG), meaning it will be capable of both acting as a USB host, like the current version, and as a USB device.
The next generation of IOIO will be a USB on-the-go (OTG) device. What this means in practice, is that the new IOIO will be capable of acting either as a USB host (like the current IOIO) or as a USB device (allowing it to connect to a PC as well as be powered by it). Moreover, it will be able to auto-detect which is the right role, according to whichever cable is connected to it (a micro-A or micro-B).
Rotary encoders are an easy way to add user input to a project, especially for stuff like menu selections. Turn the knob left and right, push down to select an option.
We’ve used encoders in several recent projects. One problem we had was that the knob overlapped another part. After a quick measurement with digital calipers, we added the knob boundary to the part footprint. No more overlap problems.
The encoder footprint, and more public domain do-whatever-you-want parts in our Eagle parts library.
John Tarbox found this open source software for designing and simulating logic circuits known as LogicCircuit. According to the developer’s website, “LogicCircuit is free, open source educational software for designing and simulating digital logic circuits. It has an intuitive graphical user interface allowing you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi-bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy.”
This is a Windows project and requires Microsoft.NET Framework 4.0 or higher.
Visit the project’s official website for downloads and more information.
Via the contact form.
Rsdio tipped us to a dual-output switch mode power supply reference design based on the MAX17116. The part and reference circuit can provide both negative and positive supplies to AMOLED displays.
The MAX17116 includes two current-mode 1.4MHz switch mode power-supply (SMPS) regulators for active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays. The positive supply is provided by a step-up regulator with a synchronous rectifier. The negative supply is provided by an inverting regulator with a synchronous rectifier.
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:
Here is an app note from Atmel describing how their TWI (I2C) peripheral, found in tinyAVRs, avoids SCL clock stretching.
This application note describes a TWI slave driver for the ATtiny20 and ATtiny40. Aslave software driver is included. The application note explains how the TWI SCL clock is not stretched, provided that the AVR clock speed is fast enough to
release the serial clock (SCL) and the acknowledge (ACK) on the serial data (SDA) signals.
Bangon Kali posted this article on how to listen for signals from an Arduino through the Serial Port (Linux, Mac) or COM Port (Windows) using the SerialPort2 Node.JS module and serve signal data to the web in real time using Socket.IO.
A PIC32 bootloader that supports about every update channel possible: UART, USB-HID, USB-MSD, Ethernet, or SD cards.
This application note describes how to use bootloader to upgrade firmware on PIC32 devices without the need for an external programmer or debugger. The source code consists of following implementations of bootloader, 1) UART 2) USB device based on HID class 3) USB host based on MSD class 4) Ethernet 5) SD card
O’Reilly is offering a free webcast relating vintage video gaming techniques to today’s web-based games.
“Back in the day, game developers were in a similar position to where web-based game developers using HTML5 Canvas are today; Graphics rendering methods were slow and they had to come up with very clever techniques to squeeze every single bit of performance from their computers. In this webcast, Andres Pagella will take attendees on a journey through history, discussing how many famous games were able to have graphics and animations that were far ahead of their time and teaching how we can apply those performance-improvement techniques in modern web-based game development projects.”
The one-hour webcast will be presented by Mario Andres Pagella on Wednesday, June 13, 2012 at 10 AM PT.
You can register at the O’Reilly webcast page.
How to use a digital potentiometer to calibrate and control an adjustable power supply.
A resistive feedback network is often used to set the output voltage of a power supply, since fixed resistors are simple to use and low cost. However, because a fixed network is not adjustable, the output voltage cannot be accurately set. Therefore, many power supplies use a mechanical potentiometer (pot) in the feedback network to set the output voltage. For easier automatic calibration, a mechanical potentiometer can be replaced with a digital potentiometer. Digital potentiometers are smaller, do not move significantly with age or vibration, and can even be recalibrated remotely. This application note explains some of the calculations required to use a digital potentiometer in this way and also provides a spreadsheet for easy calculations.
Bay Area Maker Faire 2012 is over, but we still have pictures from last year (and every other Global Geek event) sitting on desktops around the workshop. We cleared 4 computer desktops that became totally packed with crap over the last year. We also finished internal and off-site backups of all systems in the workshop. Check out the cleanness above, but don’t worry, it won’t last until the end of this post.
The New York Maker Faire soldering practice dadge has gone through minor silkscreen changes. Disappointed with the Eagle supplied footprints for LM317, and LM337 voltage regulators in to-220 packages, we built our own, and added them to our library for an upcoming project revision.
The Part Ninja desktop companion application now lets you chose the serial port the Part Ninja is connected to. Once it recovers data from the Part Ninja it displays it, and shows a connection diagram of all the conduction paths the Part Ninja found. A button copies the info to the clipboard, making it easy to post debug reports in the forum.
Enjoy your weekend!
