Popular Mechanics presents this simple DIY electromagnetic interference (EMI) detector project. It’s Arduino based and requires only an 8-ohm speaker, 1-megaohm resistor and 3–5 feet of insulated solid core wire.
Details on this easy beginner’s project can be found on the Popular Mechanics website, with links to the Arduino sketch on the author’s Github page.
Brian built a digital saxophone emulator. A mic is used to detect the pressure blowing onto the mouthpiece, while buttons detect the notes selected. An Atmel breakout board generates the sound based on these two factors.
Via Hacked Gadgets.
Kelvin built a free FT232-based LCD backpack PCB.
I have built the FT232-based LCD backpack free PCB for quite a while However, the free application provided by the project doesn’t seem to work for me.
Only until recently did I manage to find the time to write a utility in Linux for the LCD backpack. I treated it as an exercise to play with FT232 bitbang mode. The application can be found at github.com
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 contact form.
Ian is on his way to the Bay Area Maker Faire, and is having a hard time with Air France.
We continue our redesign of the secret board, we are also working on a tutorial explaining how to make separate power planes with Cadsoft Eagle.
Firmware for the Part Ninja is progressing along. We trashed the old code we had for testing, and did a complete rethink on the testing procedure. So far we are able to recognize, and determine the pinout for many 2, and 3 pin semiconductors.
We continue to render images of our projects for marketing purposes.
In the office we sent out this yesterday’s Twitter free PCB coupon codes. We talked with Seeed over a wholesale order we received.
We are off to the Bay Area Maker Faire, and we’d like to share some of the tips we picked up on our previous visit there. Below are our tips for both visitors, and participants. If you are in the area be sure to drop by.
Here is a tutorial on how to build a sous-vide cooker. Sous-Vide cookers cook food placed inside a plastic bag, which is inserted into temperature controlled bath. NerdKits describes all the theory, along with plenty of instruction on how to build your own.
Via Hacked Gadgets.
In our previous Workshop Video we mentioned we asked Pietja to solder up those pesky MMA7455L accelerometers. Here is how he got around to doing it. Check out the pics and his instructions below.
Ian asked me to solder some MMA7455L on the USB POV Toy boards. So when I got them the first thing i did was clean them all with some acetone. After that I pre tinning the pad s of the chip so it had some solder with flux on them.
SchmartBoard is giving away one new SchmartBoard SMT Arduino Prototyping Shield. To enter, visit the SchmartBoard giveaway page and fill out the registration form. You only need to enter once to have a chance to win every month that the contest runs.
Pinguino design team released the design for the Pinguino32 PIC32 development board using their Pinguino bootloader. It supports PIC32MX250F128, and PIC32MX220F032B microcontrollers. The design is open source, and made with KICAD software. Download it from their Google code area.
A few days ago we wrote about the open source USBbug LPC1343 development board designed by Squonk. He started a GitHub page for his project, and shared the first pic of the built board.
Via the forum.
Today we continue to prepare for the Bay area Maker Faire. We also made the workshop video today instead of Thursday, it’ll be about Maker Faire of course. If you subscribe to our YouTube channel you might even be able to preview the video early.
On the design side we continue to adjustment an unnamed project for a final revision. We had some issues with clearance on the rotary encoder knobs and some headers.
We are pushing the Part Ninja firmware for a release. The testing functions have been rewritten to be more modular, and easier to maintain. This will be followed with documentation on how each test is conducted, and the formulas used to determine key values.
In the office we did the payroll cause it’s the 15th, and added Evola to our distributes wiki list.
A while back we started a big box of traveling parts in the forum. We had lots of stuff we didn’t need so we packed it in a box and sent it along to Sjaak. He took some things out, added some goodies, and passed it to Riktw.
Today Riktw posted pictures of his deposit and withdraw. 2 LCDs, some flux, some prototypes, some LEDs, and some miscellaneous open hardware stuff were taken out. This stuff went back into the box (pics below):
Via the forum.
Continue reading “Big box of traveling parts update”
Exapod is building a line following robot based on the dsPIC33 and stuff he won from SparkFun‘s giveaways. Watch the little robot race through Monza in a video below.
i’m planning of building a robot with a dspic33fj128mc804 and two encoders for implement some dead reckoning algorithms so for learn something on the dspics i build a line-follower, it uses 6 analog sensors that are read with the auto-scan capability of the chip, the pwm is 12 bit and the control loop runs at almost 30 kHz (it only calculates the line position and the do a very simple PD routine that use fixed point math).
Continue reading “Line following robot based on the dsPIC33”
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:
eclectica has posted a circuit for a PICAXE-enabled raincounter. The device employs a 1mm/pulse rain gauge to measure rainfall. Pulses from the gauge’s internal reed switch are read by the PICAXE-08 MCU, which in turn stores the running count in EEPROM and displays the resulting measurement on a serial LCD readout.
While the exact type of rain gauge employed in the project is not indicated, an example is found in this 22 page PDF datasheet for a Tipping Bucket Rangauge from Campbell Scientific, Ltd.
The project description at Circuitlab contains the schematic and Picaxe code.
From IRC we bring you some pics of Robots’ mad soldering skills. This QFN chip is dead-bugged onto the back of another chip. Below there’s another QFN chip broken out with wire.
Please send in your pics of extreme soldering via the contact form.
Slack built the SARduino 644/1284 board by Andrew Schamp he got from our free PCB drawer. It’s an prototyping board with support circuitry for Arduino compatible ATmega AVRs.
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 contact form.
Today and tomorrow we’re preparing for the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend. Skot is going to display the DigitGrid project (show above) with us at Maker Faire. Stop by and check it out.
The taco crawl is booming this year. Jeff from MighyOhm is coming. Will you be there?
We’re packing all the cool stuff we’ll be showing off, as well as all the typical booth supplies like banners, cards, stickers, and of course a table cloth and extra USB cable. Several new projects were photographed for tutorials as we packed them.
In the Firmware department we’re pushing to finish the initial release candidate for the Part Ninja. Also we hope to get the POV Toy fully functional as well.
We built a 3D model of the POV Toy for today’s post, and rendered an image with Kerkythea.
In the office, we sent out the coupon codes for last weeks free PCB winners. We are also ordering some stuff that is running low at Seeed.
USBug is a LPC1343 breakout board with USB capability. The bootloader appears as a USB flash drive, just drag a new firmware into the drive to update.
Basically, my board is a 40-pin LPC1343 breakout board with 12 MHz crystal, USB Connect detection and disconnect, MicroBuilder’s single-button ISP, ISP Header and the standard LPCXpresso user LED. I added proper USB ESD/EMC handling, all this on a 5×2 cm board…
I plan to release the project as open hardware under CC-BY-SA license soon, as I just soldered the first prototype and that it is working as expected.
Via the forum.
Today’s model is the USB POV Toy. It’s a hand-held persistence of vision toy, that is can be updated over USB. Check out our workshop video about the latest developments on this project.
Want to make 3D renderings of your own projects? Here’s 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.
