Standalone version of the open source sentry gun controller

Bob designed a standalone version of his Sentry Gun controller. The first version was built as a shield for the Arduino, while the new board has the shield’s hardware and an Arduino compatible MCU on the same board.

The Sentry Gun autonomously tracks, aims, and shoots at targets using a webcam, and servos connected to a computer via his board. The project is open source and all the design files are available. Check out a video explanation of the standalone board below.

Via Hacked Gadgets.

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Lattice CPLD development board free PCB built

Colfaxmingo built a free Lattice CPLD development board PCB. CPLDs are programmable logic gate arrays which allow you to build custom logic devices by programing them.

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.

SenseMote wireless sensors and actuators via Arduino

SenseMote is an alternative firmware for the Ciseco XRF CC1110 module. It enables you to build wireless sensors and actuators via an Arduino-like sketch language.

I believe that the gateway, the “sensehub”, has a lower BOM cost than Nanode or any other open source wireless gateways and has more flexibility due to the CC1100-style radio.
The firmware provides a low power radio link from multiple sensors to the gateway. The gateway proxies to Pachube for recording data and providing a shared key/value database between nodes.
There’s an Arduino-sketch like language or you can just use the C APIs.
There’s a serial bootloader, OS-library and sample apps. The gateway uses the uIP TCP/IP stack.

Via the forum.

Followup: Driving multiple character LCD with only a few extra wires

Dccharacter responded to yesterday’s post about driving two character LCDs in parallel:

Guys tested better idea on roboforum.ru: if you put all the lines but ENABLE in parallel, you can drive as many LCDs as you want by 10+N MCU pins (where N is number of displays, or 6+N – depending on mode 8 bits or 4 bits). Enable in this case just acts as chip select.

Via the comments.

Atmel University Program Kicks Off 2012 Robotics Contest


The 2012 Atmel Robotics Contest (ARC) is currently underway. The contest is open to university students 18 years or older in North America, South America and Europe, and the goal is to develop a battery-powered 3D version of the Atmel robot ‘Mel’ (pictured above) using Arduino’s 4WD platform (for example, see Seeedstudio’s version) and Atmel components. Contestants can either work on their own or team up with other university students.

Deadline for submissions is May 18th, 2012. ARC contest rules are available in PDF from the contest webpage.

HOW-TO: Use the Bus Pirate v3 as a PIC development board

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 one. It shows how to setup the chip to run from the internal clock, and blink the MODE LED. The code is broken up and explained section by section.

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Our big box of traveling parts is in the wild

We are constantly developing prototypes, so we end up with a large pile of unused components. When we moved to a new location we realized some components sat untouched since the previous move.

A while ago we read about the The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk and decided this was a perfect way to finally get rid of these ‘old’ components without sending them to the landfill. Ian packed a bunch of stuff into a box and passed it to Sjaak. He’ll take something out, put something in, and send it to someone else.

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USB Infrared Toy free PCB build

 

Tuomas built a USB IR Toy v1.1 free PCB. With the USB IR Toy you can use a remote control with your computer, view infrared signals on a logic analyzer, capture and replay remote control buttons.

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.

Here’s how we mail free PCBs.

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

Via the forum.

Driving two character LCDs in parallel

Abdullah explored the idea of driving two character LCDs in parallel. When he couldn’t find any information about this online, he decided to try it out himself.

Then I thought about it and I gave it a go. The result is positive! However, there is a gotcha; if you are using LCDs from different manufacturers or different types, the contrast setting might differ, as it did in my example. In order to overcome this, I would suggest putting two potentiometers in your board to adjust the contrasts individually. And don’t forget, you are using one more LCD, meaning more back light current. If you are using a 7805 without a heat-sink, you should re-calculate your thermal values.

Peacon XT 8 bit bus to CompactFlash adapter

J1mbo finalized his XT-CF adaptation of our XT-IDE CPLD board. You can check out his wiki page with all the details about the board, the BOM, and the source files. This board allows vintage XT computers to use CF cards as hard drives, which keeps lots of old industrial and medical equipment going using modern parts.

It’s loosely based on our XT to IDE hard drive CPLD board, which is itself a CPLD-based knock-off of the Vintage Computer Forum’s XTIDE board. J1mbo’s version uses a flash card holder instead of an IDE hard drive.

Via the forum.

Netgear hack note


Lloyd Atkinson writes:

I was recently researching the possibility of running OpenWRT on one of my Netgear Wireless access points. I came across a Netgear page that has available TAR files of source code for hundreds of their devices! So far, it appears that Netgear uses BusyBox Linux on their devices.

I just thought some readers on this site would like to know of this! I know I’ll be reprogramming my Netgear device soon!

#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

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Using the MAX11209 18bit ADC

Jbeale connected the MAX11209 18 bit ADC to his Seeeduino board and wrote up some test firmware.

The MAX11209 can do 18 bits at sample rates up to 120 Hz (true) or 480 Hz (4x oversampled). It has both external analog and internal digital scaling. There is +Vref and -Vref, as well as +Vin and -Vin, so you can set your own full-range scale and offset via analog voltages (many ADCs have only +Vref, so you can’t set your own analog offset above ground). Maximum Vin = 3.6 V. The data sheet claim that CS/ can be tied low is apparently false (must be brought high after each SPI transaction).
The 11209 is part of a family, some other variants do 24 bits (although there I think some bits will be just noise). With the 11209 I can so far confirm that the input noise is less than 2 uV at a 15 Hz rate. Datasheet claims 0.57 uV RMS at 10 Hz.

Via the forum.

DIY high precision clock synchronized with an atomic clock

Here is a DIY high precision clock that is synced to the DCF77 atomic clock long wave radio signal. The radio signal is broadcast form Frankfurt at 77.5 KHz and has a reach of about 2000 Km.

DCF77 is the name of a german radio station on 77.5 KHz, which gives official time and date from an atomic clock located in Francfort. The time and date is coded into a 59 bit length frame, and is sent on the air through an antenna, by a 50 kilowatt power amplifier.

A simple and tiny receiver can catch the signal, from approximately 2000 kilometers around the antenna. The pulse contained in the radio frequency signal is filtered by the receiver : a 100 ms pulse is a value of 0, a 200 ms pulse is a value of 1, there is a pulse per second, and the last second of a minute lacks (there is 2 seconds without pulse) to allow synchronization with the next minute.

Via Hacked Gadgets.

Linear Technology staff Scientist Jim Williams remembered

Drone followed up on our App note: Thermocouple measurement post:

Yes, this app note is written by the venerable Jim Williams who passed away last year. Mr. Williams was the author of many famous application notes at both National Semiconductor (now owned by Texas Instruments) and Linear Technology Corp. (LTC). There is a very nice site revisiting his work here:

LTC has a tribute here

LTC’s collection of his work is here

EDN’s collection of Jim’s articles

And of-course the Wikipedia page

These link probably belong in a post of their own…

Via the comments.

Simplecortex ARM Cortex M3 dev board

Riktw designed, and got ITead Studio to produce, a Cortex M3 based Arduino compatible board called Simplecortex. The board uses the LPC1769 microcontroller from NXP:

The Simplecortex is a microcontroller development board that is shield compatible with the Arduino. The Simplecortex has a fast microcontroller, the LPC1769 from NXP. This is a ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller with 512KB flash, 64KB RAM and it runs at 120Mhz. To make sure that the Simplecortex is easy to use we made tutorials for almost every peripheral on the chip and examples to get you started.  There are tutorials for simple stuff like IO control up to more advanced tutorials for MicroSD cards. If you have ideas for a new tutorial or made a tutorial yourself, feel free to drop an email or post it in the forum. The Simplecortex also has an onboard debugger. It can also be used to program external devices like a self made PCB for your own project. No more microcontrollers with pre-programmed bootloader needed.

Via the Forum.

Atmel AT90SC3232CS smartcard destruction


Flylogic is known for their skills in reverse engineering chips. They were familiar with Atmel smartcards AT90SC3232 and AT90SC3232C and assumed that the AT90SC3232CS was similar but with an extra IO pad. They discovered the AT90SC3232CS is a completely new design based on the larger AT90SC6464C device,

Get all the fascinating details on the exploration of this smartcard and images at Flylogic’s Analytical Blog.

3D Model: PICqueno32 v1a

Our latest 3D model is the PICqueno32 v1a. This is our knock-off of the chipKIT Uno32 board. It is fully compatible with their IDE.

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 Maxwell for Google SketchUp. Later this week we will feature a tutorial on how to use the open source Kerkythea to render your images.

We used open source Kerkythea rendering system to generate the rendered image above.

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. Check out the 3D view below. You can zoom and rotate the model. (3D Warehouse still hasn’t rendered the 3D view, we’ll update the post as soon as it does)

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