DIY Arduino 6-channel temperature monitor

Johnathan Hottell wanted a way to monitor and display the temperature readings at various points around the engine on his LB7 Duramax diesel truck. He developed this project for a six channel temperature monitor employing a bank of thermistors to monitor various engine locations. They are read each second by the Arduino’s analog pins, with the values interpreted and temperatures displayed on a Nokia 3310 LCD screen.

He notes: “A commercial style temperature scanner can cost hundreds of dollars, this project minimizes that cost.” This is a good example of the cost savings that can be realized using a DIY open source solution.

The schematic, Arduino sketch and LCD library can be found on Johnathan’s website. Additional coverage and a BOM can be found on the Jameco project page.

Via Jameco.

NFC TI TRF7970A breakout board V1.1 update

Benjamin made a small update on his NFC TI TRF7970A breakout board. The board is designed to provide you access to RFID and similar RF protocols. Benjamin has 15 boards he is willing to giveaway, so contact him on his blog if you’re interested.

It is just a little update on the new board TI TRF7970A Breakout Board v1.1 I have built, I have ordered 20 PCB, it is a minor update/clean-up of the board to be easier to use (especially with SPI+SS mode which can be now selected by using simple Short Circuit Block Cap).

Via the forum.

MCHCK – a small ARM Cortex M3 development board

Small form factor board, with a STM32L151 ARM Cortex M3 for around 5 dollars. This is the target of the MCHCK development board. The board was designed to be cheap enough so that you can develop a project with it, and not have to re-purpose it for the next project, but get a new one instead. Read about the design points below.

Continue reading “MCHCK – a small ARM Cortex M3 development board”

Laser cut acrylic case for Bus Pirate v4

Here’s another cool laser cut acrylic case for the Bus Pirate. It’s made out of 4 layers of 2mm transparent acrylic. The inner two layers simultaneously act as standoffs and as an edge to the enclosure. The SVG source files are available if anyone wants to laser cut his design.

I designed a laser cut enclosure for the BusPirate V4.0 enclosure. My version uses 2 mm thick acrylic sheet..

After laser cutting I discovered that the leds are right on the edge of the PCB and interfere with the side wall of the second lasercut layer…I filed the edge it to an angle of 45 degrees on that side and filed a little bit away for R8 as well. Then it all fitted together quite nicely. After discovering that a 3M screw could be screwed tightly into the PCB holes to fixate three layers I used some thin double sided tape to stick the back layer to the PCB, so there are no screws with bolts sticking out on the underside.

See our case video from a few weeks ago, and even more awesome DIY cases from Bus Pirate fans.

The Bus Pirate is a hacking multi-tool that can talk to many common electronic chips. Get the Bus Pirate DIY edition PCB from the PCB drawer for $3.95. Get an assembled Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.

Via the forum.

Updates from the workshop for May 9th, 2012

The latest POV Toy hardware is finally assembled, and initial testing of the firmware went successfully. We still need to design a calibration routine to get the best results. Pietja’s LGA soldering pictures will be up soon.

Work on the open source USB stack demo continues. We found the right linker script for the PIC18F24J50, and now both the Logic Sniffer and the POV Toy work with it. The documentation for the stack is progressing and may be ‘announced’ next week.

We walked through JTR’s complete update of the IR Toy firmware and committed the changes to the SVN. A new test firmware v23 for all IR Toy hardware is available in the forum.

LCD and rotary encoders are working on the secret board from the flux off video. We were annoyed to find out that our knobs and encoders purchased as a set from SURE Electronics don’t seem to actually fit each other.

Coupon codes went out to the Free PCB Twitter winners. We also prepared a wholesale order for EpicTinker, who were restocking their Bus Pirate, Bus Blaster, and USB IR Toys.

Another Bus Pirate as a PIC 24FJ64GA002 development board tutorial is edited and published. There will be a few more in this series.

Work continues on the hush-hush breakout board. It’s a new concept with a proto-board style area, which was giving us lots of grief fitting the components on the board. We had to do a lot of trial and error with this board.

HOW-TO: Bus Pirate PIC 24 analog to digital converter tutorial

The Bus Pirate is a handy debugging tool, but it’s also a 16 bit PIC 24FJ64GA002 development board. You don’t need a programmer to play, just upload the firmware over USB using the Bus Pirate’s nearly-impossible-to-brick bootloader. It’s easy to go back to the original Bus Pirate firmware at any time.

This demo is step three, you can find previous steps in our tutorial wiki, or check out our previous posts (1, 2). It shows how to setup the PIC to read the ADC pin of the Bus Pirate with the internal analog to digital converter.  The code below is broken up and explained section by section.

Overview
The Bus Pirate uses the PIC24FJ64GA002 microcontroller, and can be used as a development board. In this demo we’ll use the ADC pin to control the MODE LED. If the voltage on the ADC pin drops below 3 volts the LED will turn off.

Continue reading “HOW-TO: Bus Pirate PIC 24 analog to digital converter tutorial”

Bay Area Maker Faire May 19th & 20th, taco crawl, free tickets

We’ll be at the Bay Area Maker Faire on the 19th, and 20th of May this year. This is the big one and it’s a ton of fun. If you’re there please drop by and say hi. On the blog we’ll have our usual Maker Faire coverage and a Maker Faire how-to video.

Make gave us two free tickets for friends, we’re going to give them away in this post. Please leave a comment on this post about what you look forward to seeing, and we’ll give the tickets away on Thursday.

If you’re in San Francisco early please join us for the Dangerous taco crawl from Noise Bridge hacker space through the Mission District on Thursday the 17th. We’ll meet at Noise Bridge on the corner of 16th and Mission Street at about 6pm. Chris Gammel from Amp Hour will be joining us this year, if you can make it please give us a shout via the contact form.

Last year we presented as part of Seeed Studio’s booth, but this year we’re on our own. We could really use some help manning the booth for a few hours over the weekend. If you’re interested please let us know, there are free tickets available for presenters.

Check out our previous Maker Faire coverages.

Instructables is having a huge 3D printer giveaway

Instructables is having a huge 3D printer giveaway. Enter until 6th of June for the chance to win an Objet desktop 3D printer with a 6 month printing material supply, an UP! 3D printer, or free 3D printing services:

This is your chance to win an Objet 3D Printer with a 6 month supply of 3D printing materials.  Ten first prize winners will receive an Up! 3D Printer.  Twenty runners-up will receive free 3D printing services.

To enter, post an Instructable that has anything in it that was at least partially designed using a computer: a sticker, a 3D printed object, laser-cut files, an electronics schematic, and even an inkjet printer template. So long as something in your project involved computer design (a digital sketch, 2D files, schematics, or a 3d model) before you built the physical object, your Instructable is eligible!

IAR KickStart kit for TI MSP430FR5739


IAR Systems is offering the MSP-EXP430FR5739 Experimenter’s board as part of an IAR KickStart Kit. The kit includes Integrated TI MSP430FR5739 device, USB debugging and programming interface, 3-axis accelerometer, NTC thermistor for temperature sensing, 2 user input switches and a reset switch, 8 LEDs for output display. The board also provides for connectivity to the MSP-EXP430F5438 Experimenter Board and to the CCxxx radio daughter cards. Software included is the IAR Embedded Workbench for MSP430 (8K Kickstart and 30-day evaluation editions) and the IAR visualSTATE evaluation edition (20-state limitation), along with example applications from IAR Systems and TI.

The kit is currently priced at EUR 25/29 USD. For more information visit IAR Systems.

Open source low-speed bit bang USB interface for 8bit PICs

Low-speed USB using bit banging for small PIC16F chips, similar what the V-USB project does for AVRs:

The 16FUSB is a software implementation of the USB low-speed for PIC16F628/628A microcontroller. All communication stuff is done by the firmware, completely discarding the need to use an additional chip. From the 16FUSB core is possible to add implementations of other protocols such as, for example, I2C, SPI or simple write data from the USB host (PC) directly to the PIC pins. A low-speed USB software implementation can be a great alternative for those who want lower cost projects and at the same time also doesn’t need high speed data transfer.

Via the forum.

PCB review Tuesday technical difficulties

Due to a problem encoding the screen capture the debut of PCB review Tuesday will have to wait. Thanks to everyone who submitted a PCB for comments, we’ll get them up ASAP.

If you’d like someone to give your PCB a second look before you send it to the fab, or just want advise on placement on a new PCB, please post the Cadsoft Eagle files in the forum. We’ll choose a few boards every week and talk about them in a five minute video.

PCB routing is an art. There’s lots of styles, and ours isn’t the right one or the best. Our goal is to start a dialog that helps everyone, including us, make better PCBs.

Problems with long cables and common solutions demonstrated

Bertho was inspired by a recent forum discussion about driving SPI signals over long cables, so he headed to the workshop and did some test. His epic analysis of transmission lines shows real life example of how signals degrade in cables of various lengths, and how to tackle some of the problems associated with transmission lines.

Over at Dangerous Prototypes I got involved in a forum post about problems with an SPI bus, where the signals would not function anymore after some distance. There were two things that my experience told me: 1) check the power supply, 2) check the cabling for reflection. Then I realized, this must be a common problem for all hobby hackers. Cabling is a difficult topic and it is time to demystify some magic.

This is an great writeup, don’t miss it.

Via the forum.

USB Infrared Toy firmware v23 test

A test version of firmware v23 for the USB Infrared Toy is available. JTR rewrote most of the code, and the result is over 50% smaller, simpler, and easier to debug. There are major improvements to sampling mode and SUMP logic analyzer mode.

The latest open source USB stack is included. Feed the cool breeze of open source USB!

As always there will be lots of little bugs. Any tests and reports are greatly appreciated! Update instructions are here.

  • Rewritten IR Sample mode should squash any remaining bugs with WinLIRC transmissions
  • Reworked SUMP logic analyzer mode samples longer and fast, it’s easier to capture long remote signals and visualize them in the logic analyzer
  • Hardened USB stack should work better than ever. Experimental support for suspend

You can get IR Toy v2 for $22.05, including world wide shipping.

#FreePCB via Twitter to 2 random RTs

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:

  • Hate Twitter and Facebook? Free PCB Sunday is the classic PCB giveaway. Catch it every Sunday, right here on the blog
  • Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
  • Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs will be your friend for the weekend

Continue reading “#FreePCB via Twitter to 2 random RTs”

Carambola controlled quadcopter


Saulius writes: “I have just tested in the air my latest quadcopter telemetry link using low-cost open-source wifi board. This link can be used not only to relay telemetry data but control SU(A)V from joystick and get video back to ground station.”

The copter uses the Carambola low cost, open-source WiFi (21.5 dB / 2.4GHz) embeddable WiFi transceivers from 8devices as the means of establishing a bi-directional air-ground link to relay telemetry data.

Check out the project log and source code at Saulius’ website.

Workshop update May 8, 2012

Starting today we’ll post a daily summary of our work in the forum and workshop. Our goal is to better track our progress on projects, but also give you a closer look at what’s going on to get feedback earlier in the process.

In the workshop we finished building the secret board from the second flux off video. So far so good, but we came up with a handful of changes to implement before the first production version. Tomorrow we’ll write some firmware.

We also started work on another cool breakout board for a new chip nobody else is offering yet. Unfortunately this project is also under wraps, you’ll have to be patient until we publicly unveil it.

After two years the USB POV Toy might actually be completed. We had problems soldering the LGA-packaged MMA7455 accelerometer on the latest prototype, it’s a tiny chip without any exposed leads at all. Pietja came to the rescue and soldered 4 of them for us (pictured above). The boards arrived today, so we’ll finish the final prototype this afternoon. Thanks Pietja!

There’s also a lot of activity on the open source USB stack by JTR and Honken. We’re diving in to prepare a release package and documentation. Look for some new firmware based on the latest stack later this week.

In the office we’re consolidating PayPal transactions into GnuCash, the accounting software we use.

Hybrid race car build update

Some time ago we wrote about the Bus Pirate being used to debug the electronics on a Hybrid race car. Here is an update on the race car development:

Last Saturday we tested the car at Pitney Bowes in the Rensselaer Tech Park.

There were a few hiccups in the car – our starter battery and air shifter weren’t working. The motor belt was slipping too, but we were able to run the car anyways. Check out the pictures!

Via the contact form.

Pinguino X.3 is out

Pinguino, the open source IDE for PIC-based Arduino compatible boards, just released version X.3. Software is still in beta testing mode, so if you run into a bug be sure to contact the developers about it.

PinguinoX.3 is now available in the download area for both Linux and Windows computer.
With the help of all the users and the developers team, many improvement have been added to make Pinguino a better development environment. Still in Beta, as usual, but to be improved with your remarks, critics, suggestions…..