EEWeb: Bus Pirate as low-cost JTAG programmer

Victor Joukov noticed this article on the EEWeb electrical engineering community about Programming With Low-Cost JTAG Tools, referencing the Bus Pirate.

Notable is the Bus Pirate from Dangerous Prototypes. Originally designed as a tool to sniff, monitor, inject or bus protocols like SPI, its open platform has meant that the ‘community’ has developed an XSVF player. This allows a user to convert an SVF file format to XSVF with the tools supplied. The board, which is a very good price, can then be easily re-programmed as a JTAG programmer. You then simply run the right command from your computer and the file is uploaded to the Bus Pirate via USB which then carries out the required toggling of the JTAG lines.

You can order your own Bus Pirate for under $30 today.

Via the contact form.

Workshop Update for May 25th, 2012

We finished responding to every email received during the Maker Faire, and wrote everyone who gave us a business card. If you were expecting a mail and didn’t get one, please followup again, it may have been lost in the shuffle.

We also debugged the RSS feed issue. FireFox uses the description field of the feed. We will hack WordPress to fix it as described here soon.

We added some components to our Eagle parts library, and made so minor silkscreen modifications to others.

The Part Ninja firmware is committed to the SVN. It is still a long way from finished, but it will recognize, and show pinout for capacitors, resistors, BJTs, JFETs, MOSFETs, SCRs, TRIAC, and all variations of double, and regular diodes. Still unimplemented is the capacitance measurement, and JFET part specific measurements. Also the resistance measurement is currently a little buggy. We will continue to work on it next week, and bring you full documentation on how the Part Ninja does it’s testing.

Panelizing multiple PCB on a single cheap PCB service

Schazamp made an instructable on how to get multiple PCB onto a single cheap PCB service, like Seeed’s Fusion, or ITead’s Open PCB. The process involves merging the gerber files with GerbMerge.

just wrote up an instructable about how you can easily panelize PCBs for SeeedStudio’s Fusion PCB service. I thought it might be of some interest here, especially considering that they are currently offering 10 count 10cm x 10cm PCBs for the same price as 10 count 10cm x 5cm PCBs.

Be sure to check out our “Get you PCBs made” tutorial.

Via the forum.

Video #24: Project interviews at Bay Area Maker Faire 2012

Here’s some new and extended project interviews from Bay Area Maker Faire 2012. These took place at the setup, faire, and after party. Generally a few people bring projects to show us, so we interviewed them right at our own table.

Some were in yesterday’s video, but we put all the new stuff first. Some of the repeated interviews also have ‘unseen footage’ that we couldn’t fit into the how-to video.

May 25: National Geek Day


It’s National Geek Day / Geek Pride Day! According to Wikipedia, “Geek Pride Day is an initiative to promote geek culture, celebrated on 25 May. The date was chosen as to commemorate the release of the first Star Wars film, A New Hope on 25 May 1977 (a/k/a Star Wars Day), but shares the same date as two other similar fan “holidays”: Towel Day, for fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy by Douglas Adams, and the Glorious 25 May for fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

The initiative originated in Spain in 2006 as “Orgullo Friki” and spread around the world via the internet.”

What geekiness are you celebrating today?

Via Wired.

Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters


Every Friday we give away some extra PCBs via Facebook. This post was announced on Facebook, and on Monday we’ll send coupon codes to two random commenters. More PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday and the blog every Sunday.

Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:

Continue reading “Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters”

SDR#: C#-based SDR app


Here’s a new open source Windows SDR application. According to the developers, “SDR# (read SDR Sharp) is a simple, intuitive, small and fast PC-based DSP application for Software Defined Radio. It’s written in C# with both object design correctness and performance in mind. The main purpose is to offer a simple proof of concept application to get hands into DSP techniques. It supports SoftRock, FiFiSDR, FUNcube Dongle, SDR-4 and any sound card based SDR front end.”

The program’s setup instruction page makes no mention of the RTL-SDR, but users of that hardware may want to give it a try.

You can download the application and source code from SDRsharp.

Week in (p)review May 25, 2012

This week was dominated by Bay Area Maker Faire coverage, but we managed to slip in an Eagle how-to and 3D model as well. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon.

Coming up:

  • The extended and unseen project interviews from Maker Faire
  • Free PCBs via Facebook on Friday
  • App notes on the weekend
  • Free PCB Sunday
  • New 3D model on Monday
  • Free PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday
  • Weekly roundup and preview every Friday

What are you hacking this week?

Email cleared and RSS feed fixed

We finished responding to every email received during the Maker Faire, and wrote everyone who gave us a business card. If you were expecting a mail and didn’t get one, please followup again, it may have been lost in the shuffle.

In site news, something happened to the RSS feed that caused it show a summary instead of the complete article. We’d never intentionally limit the feed to an excerpt, it looks like there was a problem with WordPress or a plugin. Everything has been upgraded and the cache cleared, the feed seems to show the full articles in our Thunderbird RSS subscription now. We apologize for any annoyance caused.

Image from Mozilla Thunderbird.

Programmable Dummy Load build

Schazamp built the Programmable Dummy Load free PCB. It’s a new development project which allows you to set the load current via USB, or LCD/encoder combo.

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.

Sponsor the Open Hardware Summit – we just did!

This is our third year sponsoring the Open Hardware Summit happening September 27, 2012. You can be a sponsor too:

The Open Hardware Summit is made possible through the generosity of sponsors — individuals, hackerspaces, businesses large and small — who recognize the importance of an ongoing conversation about the Open Hardware Movement. Your donations allow us to keep ticket prices low, and help ensure that the summit remains accessible to all open hardware enthusiasts.

Please consider showing your support by pledging at one of the levels below. This year’s sponsor packet contains more detailed information on the benefits available at each pledge level, and can be downloaded here: Sponsorship Packet

This year, we are excited to offer funders at the Fanatic+ level the opportunity to fund a named travel fellowship to bring an open practitioner to the conference who would not normally be able to come — please see the packet for more information.

We’re really glad to see the low-range sponsorships back this year. Even ‘for fun’ projects can get in on it. There’s also a new central Manhattan location that should be a lot of fun.

Remember there’s less than a week left to submit a proposal for a talk, poster, or project demo. We’ll post our submission when we finish it, probably a poster on USB IDs ’cause they didn’t accept our talk about it last year. If you need an example to get started, take a look at our proposals from 2011 (talk, breakout, demo).

Workshop update for May 24th, 2012

Today we finished up the Bay Are Maker Faire video, and unpacked the prototypes. We caught up on forum support, and are in the process of answering our email backlog. Some minor updates to the Maker Faire wiki have new info from our 2012 trip.

We finished some Part Ninja updates. Since the LCD is placed on the bottom side of the board, all our bottom silkscreen was upside down in regard to the LCD orientations, this was fixed.

Part Ninja firmware is under calibration and testing. It successfully identifies: MOSFETs, BJT, double diodes, Zener diodes, resistors, and capacitors. The correct pinout and part specific information is displayed as well. Once we add JFETs, only the documentation and cleanup are left before we release it to SVN.

In the office we sent out new prototype PCBs to be made, amongst them the latest revision of the Part Ninja.

Maker Faire 2012 epilogue: Holy sh*t!!

Maker Faire was more than amazing this year. Thank you for stopping to say hi, demoing your project, listening to our presentation, and being in our video. A huge thanks to Skot for showing the awesome Digit_Grid and talking to so many people about our projects. Thank you Instructables, Macetech, and Jeri Ellsworth for organizing great parties. A huge thank you to everyone who turned up on our taco crawl, especially Josh who took us off the beaten path.

The small-but-growing open source hardware business community is pretty tight. We exchange a lot of emails, but Maker Faire is the rare chance to meet face to face. It was great to catch up with Jeff from MightyOhm, Windell and Lenore from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, Parker, Jaren “who is everywhere”, and Eric and Christy from Instructables. This year we also met up with a bunch of people for the first time: Garrett from Macetech, Chris from The Amp Hour, THE Kenneth Finnegan of free PCB fame, and of course Lady Ada and Phillip Torrone.

We also want to recognize friends like Mitch Altman, hackerspace advocate and creator of the TV B Gone, who were unable to attend this year due to reasons of conscience. We commend him for putting his values first, and respect his strong stance. Maker Faire is not the same without him.

One year ago we made our first foray out of mom’s basement to join Seeed Studio at the Bay Area Maker Fair 2011. In last year’s epilogue we wrote about our biggest take home lesson: “be visible”. We committed to attend Maker Faires, to visit hackerspaces, to meet other hackers.

A lot has happened since then. We started a weekly workshop update video, which evolved from an awkwardly-angled desk-side chat into a full fledged workshop studio. We went to Maker Faire New York and led a discussion at the Open Hardware Summit. In Japan we went to the Maker Meeting with Tokyo Hackerspace and kicked off the Global Geek Tour. From Hacker Space Seoul in Cheonggyecheon, to China’s first Maker Faire and Hua Qaing Bei market, we met the most amazing hackers along the way.

In that time Dangerous Prototypes has grown from a couple part-time contributors to a full-time team of three kicking out new tutorials, open source hardware, and firmware updates every week. Being visible and participating in the open hardware community has made this possible. If we learned one lesson from the past year, it’s how important it is to visit your nearest hackerspace or get involved with local DIY groups.

Thank you. Thank you for reading the blog, using our projects, and making this all possible.

@DangerousProto was the top Tweeter at Bay Area Maker Faire 2012

@DangerousProto was the #1 Tweeter at Bay Area Maker Faire. We tweeted over 50 pictures during the trip. Be sure to follow us for the latest geekery, we’ll be using it a lot more in the future.

Congratulations to T-Mobile for making a cell service that doesn’t suck, we used a $3/day unlimited “4G” plan on prepaid SIMs with our Google Galaxy phones. Props to our media wizard Mad Skillz Skyler for finding the tiny corner of Maker Faire where the crowd’s smartphones didn’t totally kill 3G service! More about mobile data at many popular geek events on your conferences wiki.

HOW-TO VIDEO #23: Bay Area Maker Faire 2012

Experience the Bay Area Maker Faire from the perspective of a presenter. Veteran Makers talk about their projects, and give advice on preparing for your first Maker Faire. We also take you inside the ‘exclusive’ maker-only pre and post parties. You’ve never seen a Maker Faire video like this.

Don’t miss last week’s video with our tips on preparing for Maker Faire. See our conferences wiki for information on accommodations, transportation, communication, and more at many popular hardware hacker locations.

Open source superstars in this video:

A list of the Maker Faire must-haves mentioned in the video is below the break. What are your tips?

Continue reading “HOW-TO VIDEO #23: Bay Area Maker Faire 2012”

Salvaging a touch-pad form an old laptop

Instead of trowing away an old useless laptop, Viktor decided to open it up and salvage what he can. One thing that caught his eye was the touch-pad. The control circuitry was on a separate PCB making his life easier, and to top it off the PCB had test points with PS/2 connections. All that was needed to make it an independent mouse was to solder an old PS/2 cable to the board.

#Twatch turned into a SNTP clock

David modified his #Twatch firmware to display time collected from a custom GPS-NTP  server. He provided full documentation for his modifications, as well as the source code.

While the #twatch is not the ideal display I envisioned, it was an excellent first try on my part. I had to make some simplifications due to the lack of configurability and the limitation of the flash memory in the Microchip controller. The clock only displays UTC, and in the American format at that. The display uses the default pool.ntp.org addresses to get its time from; it’s not possible to specify a custom NTP server. (Both I and my workplace each have a Garmin GPS module and an NTP server, which were, ironically, much cheaper and easier than a display has proven to be!)

Via the forum.

RIP — Heathkit


After announcing last fall that they were re-entering the electronics kit business, it is now being reported that Heathkit Educational Systems has officially ended operations. According to the ARRL, it appears that the company discontinued operations in March or April, 2012, having previously laid off most of their workforce last December.

This is certainly sad news, as generations of geeks have fond memories of Heathkit when it operated a popular kit business from 1947 to 1992. At their height in the 1970s, they even operated a nationwide chain of over-the-counter stores! Whether it was building amateur radio equipment, test equipment, a TV or even a computer, many aspiring hackers of that generation cut their teeth on Heathkits. Their detailed assembly manuals and “we won’t let you fail” motto encouraged many hobbyists to build more difficult kits than they thought possible, and spurred interest in tech hacking beyond the kit arena. They were one of a kind.

Workshop Update for May 23rd, 2012

We unpacked our Maker Faire kit, scanned in business cards, and started editing the video. There will probably be one epic “how-to participate in a Maker Faire” video with tips, project interviews, and a behind the scenes look at the pre- and post- parties.

A tutorial on how to create parts with same pin names was added to the wiki, and we wrote an epilogue for the 2012 Bay Area Maker Faire.

We’ve been playing with the Part Ninja for a while now,  and noticed some hardware bugs that managed to get through the first two revisions. One is the battery power supply control transistor(T5) that was incorrectly positioned in the schematic, and the other is a slight pin naming correction.

The firmware for Part Ninja is one step closer to finalization. We added functions that print out the pinouts and part specific values. We fixed a lot of small bugs, and debugged the JFET recognition function which didn’t work.

In the office we filled out some restock requests for the USB IR Toy, and the Logic Sniffer.

Maker Faire HOW-TO video will be up tomorrow, and a bunch of project interviews will be online Friday.

HOW-TO: Create parts with separate power pins

Ever wonder how some designs group all the power supply pins in one corner of the schematic? They look organized, and it’s easier to understand how the circuit works because pins are grouped by function. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to make an Eagle part with separate power pins. This can be extended to group pins by function as well.

Continue reading “HOW-TO: Create parts with separate power pins”