Planetjay posted his Bus Pirate v3.5a SOIC PCB build. These boards were designed with the larger SOIC PIC microcontrollers to be easier to solder for beginners. You can get your own DIY Edition Bus Pirate in the free PCB drawer for $3.95.
Via the forum.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
asdf informs us that TI has the CC110L RF Module BoosterPack now in stock and available for $19. According to TI:
The CC110L RF BoosterPack is a low-power wireless transceiver extension kit for use with the Texas Instruments MSP-EXP430G2 LaunchPad development kit. Based on the CC110L device, the on-board Anaren Integrated Radio (AIR) A110LR09A radio module with integrated antenna operates in the European 868-870MHz and US 902-928MHz ISM bands. The included software application, called AIR BoosterStack, demonstrates an example sensor network as well as network status reporting.
Note that this pack includes two shields which attach to the MSP430 LaunchPad boards. Therefore, you’ll need two Launchpad boards in order to use the hardware as described in the Quick Start Guide.
Visit the Anaren website for software downloads and docs.
Via the contact form.
Pete is porting Frodo, a free Commodore 64 emulator, to Microsoft’s Flash-imitator Silverlight. Frodo is originally written in C and uses pointers extensively. Silverlight doesn’t allow pointers, so Pete demonstrates how to emulate them.
Simulating pointers in pointer-free sandboxed platforms is a bit unorthodox, but can make translating code easier…This isn’t something you’re likely to need to do in your own code, but it an interesting exercise in any case.
Open Hardware Journal is a quarterly online magazine dedicated to open hardware. So far the second issue is out now, and a third is expected in May. Issues are about 30 pages long and feature various open source hardware projects in detail. The Journal and the project articles are, of course, open source licensed.
Via the contact form.
This lightning talk from the recent 28C3 conference in Berlin is a general introduction and status update on the development of the FreedomBox project.
The FreedomBox is a personal server running a free software operating system and free applications, designed to preserve personal privacy by providing a secure platform upon which federated social networks can be constructed. The software for FreedomBox is being assembled by volunteer programmers around the world who believe in Free Software and a Free Society.
While the talk is a bit disjointed, and the concept seems like vaporware, this project is in fact the subject of ongoing R and D in the hacker community. A FreedomBox hackfest is scheduled for Presidents’ Day weekend (February 18-20, 2012) in NYC.
Check out the Freedombox website for project details.
Making workshop videos is a lot of fun, but editing the high-def video is painfully slow on even our best CAD workstation. We set out to upgrade one workstation to run Adobe Premiere with a budget of about 500 bucks. It’s not a killer gaming rig, but it encodes videos in minutes instead of hours:
We made this build video so we could test the new workstation. It’s a huge upgrade! On the old system it took about 2 hours to encode a 5 minute video for YouTube, the new system it took about 6 minutes. It took about 20 minutes to edit the video, with no crashes or lag. Editing workshop videos will be a lot more fun in the future.
Next week we’re back with a Free PCB episode. Find out why we give away free PCBs, and how we mail them out.
Bus Pirate v4 is back in stock at Seeed Studio. Compare it to v3:
Bus Pirate v4 is new and shiny, but it will lag behind the trusty v3 for a while. If you want proven goodness we still recommend the v3, it is actively developed and will be manufactured for the foreseeable future. v4 will continue to improve, and we’ll let you know when we think it is the go-to hardware.
You can get a Bus Pirate v4 for $40, including worldwide shipping.
Jay built a Bus Pirate Arduino Shield from a free PCB. This board gives the Arduino the same front-end circuity as the Bus Pirate.
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.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Via the forum.
Raspberry Pi’s first batch will be manufactured by the 20th of February and should be on sale by the end of the month. These credit card sized boards support a full Linux operating system. A nice addition is that Broadcom released some documentation related to the BCM2835 system on chip used on the Pi. Previously the datasheet required a non-disclosure agreement. Who’s getting the Pi?
Arhi needed to do some debugging on an ET-STM32F103 board. He whipped out his Bus Blaster v2 and got it working with the CooCox IDE, a free tool for working with ARM Cortex M0 and M3 32bit microcontrollers.
To summarize, if you want to program Cortex M0 or Cortex M3 on windows CooCox works perfectly with BusBlaster (fully operational, all debugging features enabled afaic).
p.s.
CooCox supports Atmel, Energy Micro, Holtek, NXP, Nuvoton, ST and TI made Cortex M0 and Cortex M3 mcu’s.
Thanks Arhi! Via the forum.
Most multimeters, even the high priced ones, measure low current poorly. The OpenCurrent is a multimeter adapter that increases the precision of low level current measurement.
Update: Based on the uCurrent by Dave Jones of EEVblog. Read more here [PDF].
Steve at Big Mess o’ Wires has resumed work on his Macintosh floppy drive emulator project. Previously he had developed the project on a breadboard using an Altera EPM7128S CPLD and an Atmel ATMEGA32u4 microcontroller. Now he has assembled it on a project board and updated some of his components. He writes:
The firmware has now been partially converted to the new microcontroller and pin arrangement, and I’m able to read the SD card and write to the LCD screen without problems.
For those who may have missed the earlier progress updates, Floppy Emu is a floppy disk drive emulator for classic Macintosh computers like the Mac Plus. It plugs into the Mac’s DB-19 port, and behaves exactly like an external Sony 3.5″ disk drive would, so no special system software or other modifications are required. Floppy disk images are stored on a standard SD memory card, and a microcontroller (Atmel ATEMGA1284P) and CPLD (Xilinx XC9572XL) are used to read/write the floppy data. The data is converted into the GCR-encoded serial pulse stream that the Mac expects, exactly like the signal from a magnetic read head flying across a track on a real floppy disk.
You can get more photos and project info at Big Mess o’ Wires.
Part Ninja V1 is a electronic component testing tool. It identifies electronic components like transistors and FETs, determines the pinout, and measures basic specifications. Several SMD footprints are included so surface mount parts can be tested too.
Only a few pins and resistors are needed for the transistor tester, so we used the extra PIC hardware to add extra features. A voltage reference along with the PIC’s comparators should help us measure capacitors somewhat accurately. In many designs there are dead spots where resistor measurements are not accurate – we added an extra resistor ladder with a wide range of values to compensate.
This is just our first development prototype to get familiar with how semiconductor testers work. This design borrows heavily from other DIY testers, such as the AVR Transistor Tester. We hope to develop it further into a simple-to-use semiconductor tester and LCR meter, then release it as a project at Seeed.
Cosminnci posted pictures of his free Bus Pirate v4 LCD adapter v2a PCB build. These boards are designed to let you quickly test 44780 compatible LCDs with your Bus Pirate v4.
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.
The Bus Pirate PIC programming adapter is back in stock at Seeed. It enables a Bus Pirate v3 (only!) to program PIC 12/16/18Fs that need a 13volt hit on MCLR to enter programming mode. You can program PIC 18FxxJ/24/30/33F without an adapter, and some experimental PIC32 support is also available in the forum.
At this time only a handful of PICs can be programmed with the Bus Pirate. The PiratePICprog programming application is getting a lot of attention lately though, so we built a new batch of the programming adapters.
If you’re really into programming PICs, this is not the tool for you. $30 for a Bus Pirate + $10 for the adapter is more expensive than a PICkit clone, and you don’t get debugging. This is still relatively experimental and only suitable to developers who don’t mind compiling code.
Seeed currently has it listed at $12, but we’ll request a lower price. Some proceeds from the programming adapter will go to the volunteers who are adding PICs and improving the programming software.
Shuckc ported Contiki OS 2.5 to run on the web platform. Now some additional documentation is available to help get you started with this port.
Contiki is an open source operating system for embedded devices. It supports both IPv4 and IPv6 internet protocols, and is not too taxing on memory, usually taking around 40KB of ROM and a few K of RAM. If you need a secure and reliable web hosting for your new blog or website, you may look into these Private blog network hosting services.
Get an assembled web platform for $40, including worldwide shipping.
A box of PCBs just arrived from Seeed Studio’s Fusion PCB service. The XT-IDE adapter V2 board is now available in our Free PCB drawer. The board was designed to allow XT type vintage computers to use newer IDE type hard drives.
XT-IDE Adapter v2 is available now in the free PCB drawer.
Ginpb built a free TQFP-100 breakout board. This board was designed to provide essential discrete components to a Microchip microcontroller in a TQFP-100 (0.4mm pitch, PT designation) package. A 3.3V power supply, decoupling capacitors, 2 crystals, USB, and a programming header are on the board.
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.
TI has introduced the LM5017 buck regulator.
The LM5017 is a 100 V, 600 mA synchronous step-down regulator with integrated high side and low side MOSFETs. The constant-on-time (COT) control scheme employed in the LM5017 requires no loop compensation, provides excellent transient response, and enables very low step-down ratios. The on-time varies inversely with the input voltage resulting in nearly constant frequency over the input voltage range. A high voltage startup regulator provides bias power for internal operation of the IC and for integrated gate drivers.
A peak current limit circuit protects against overload conditions. The undervoltage lockout (UVLO) circuit allows the input undervoltage threshold and hysteresis to be independently programmed.
The device comes in LLP-8 and PSOP-8 packages. You can download the 17 page datasheet PDF here.
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:
