Week in (p)review: December 16, 2011

Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week:

Coming up:

  • Final Bus Pirate week video – we hack the Bus Pirate to measure capacitors and unbox some parts from mouser
  • More videos from the lab next week, mostly board builds
  • App notes on the weekend
  • Free PCB Sunday
  • Free PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday
  • New designs on Thursday
  • Free PCBs via Facebook on Friday
  • Weekly roundup and preview every Friday

What are you hacking this week?

DIY Arduino Leonardo clone

Here (machine translation) is a DIY single-layer version of the Arduino Leonardo. The blogger goes into detail on how to build one yourself. Everything is covered from preparing and etching your own DIY board, to fine pitch soldering of the ATmega32u4 IC. Once you have built your board, they show you how to upload a bootloader into the microcontroller.

The Arduino Leonardo is a new platform from the Arduino team that uses the ATmega32U4 uC with built in USB capability. This eliminates the need for the expensive FTDI USB-to-serial ICs and keeps the costs down.

Via comments.

nedoCPU-32 through hole PIC32 dev-boards are available

Shaos let us know that his nedoCPU-32 boards and kits are available for purchase on his site. The nedoCPU-32 is a breakout board for PIC32 microcontrollers that come in through-hole packages. His board has a built in power supply, a quartz oscillator, and a passive protection circuit on the broken out pins. We covered the development over the past month.

One thing to note about his board is that all the breakout pins are setup in a “knife”. This makes it is easy to interface with all 24 pins using just one side of a standard bread-board.

Via the forum.

openHiFi open source digital music player update

Brian is hard at work designing an open source HiFi stereo digital music player. A Cortex M3 decodes various audio formats and sends them to a digital to analog converter audio IC via an I2S interface. This is all implemented on his Procyon development board.

In this video he tests his firmware using a custom WM8740-based DAC board.

Digital surface level detector

Shawon made a surface level meter that indicates when the surface of an object is not level. He used an SCA610 single-axis accelerometer to take the measurements. A PIC16F684 microcontroller controls the angle indicator LEDs and a buzzer. You can check out the video of his circuit in action below.

A bubble or spirit level meter is a handy tool to find whether a surface is horizontal or vertical. It is often carried by civil engineers, mechanical engineers, surveyors, carpenters, and many other professionals whose work involve precise alignments of horizontal and vertical planes. Original spirit levels had two banana-shaped curved glass vials at each viewing point and were much more complicated to use. Mechanical spirit level meters are still available both in 1D and 2D formats. However at present time their electronic counterparts have also emerged and are even available in modern Android equipped cell phones. It’s from there I got my inspiration to make a very simple digital spirit level. Here’s a demo of such an electronic spirit level made by using a Microchip PIC16F684 micro, a SCA610 accelerometer and a handful of other discrete components.

Via Embedded Lab.

Continue reading “Digital surface level detector”

The LiveLight Project: open source ambilight solution


Juha Kuusama writes to inform us of LiveLight, a cool DIY ambilight project. This is a homebrew ambilight system by SunWind that has 9 PWM controlled RGB channels which drive RGB LED strips that are mounted in the back of a 40″ Sony Bravia. All the parameters can be reprogrammed to match your taste.

The open source design is freely available from the LiveLight project page.

Via the contact form.

Get your stuff made – Tokyo open hardware presentation

Here’s a video of our presentation about manufacturing open hardware at Make Tokyo Meeting. You can download the slides here.

This is a highly condensed version of the same presentation we gave at the Open Hardware Summit and Homecamp. We cut it down so we could still fit in the allotted time if a Japanese translator was available. We’ll get a better video of the full version at the next conference.

Due to demo FAIL, this is in lieu of the Bus Pirate week video planned for today. We’ll be back tomorrow with the conclusion of Bus Pirate week though.

Bus Pirate servo driver documentation

We added documentation for the Bus Pirate servo mode. This mode was designed to allow Bus Pirate users to quickly test RC hobby servos. Firmware v6 has an overhauled servo mode as requested by several users.

To start this mode use the “S” command. Now you will be able to select the degree of movement for the servo from 0 to 180 degrees. Check out the documentation wiki for further details.

Arup’s DIY fine-pitch soldering technique

Arup started building his Nokia LCD breakout boards and shared his soldering technique for the 0.5mm pitch connector.

First he aligns and fixes the connector in place with a bit of sticky tape. Next he applies some flux. Now the interesting part is that when he solders the connector he doesn’t use any additional solder. Only the tin already on the PCB is used to make the connection. For a more in depth pictorial check out his post.

Via the forum.

Cadsoft Eagle v6 bug

We received this error when using the new version of Eagle:

WARNING: Most unfortunately, after the whole release process for version 6.0.0 had been finished, it turned out that there is a bug in the polygon handling of the CAM Processor.
If a board contains signal polygons that have their “Orphans” parameter set to “off”, and the CAM Processor is used to generate production data with the “pos. Coord” (positive coordinates) option turned on, and if this actually leads to an offset in the CAM data, it can happen that parts of the signal polygons are not drawn, even though they are not orphans, and vice versa.
This may lead to missing electrical connections or copper in places where this is not intended.
As an immediate workaround you can turn the “pos. Coord” option off.
We are working on a solution for this and will release a fixed version as soon as possible.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

We’ve decided to hold off on our transition to v6 for a few months. We are looking forward to the new copy & paste functions, as well as the open XML file format.

Application to Proto Labs for a Protomold Bus Pirate case

 

As we mentioned in the Bus Pirate case video, we are trying to get fcobcn’s milled Bus Pirate case turned into a molded product. Molded cases are pretty cheap, unfortunately the molds are thousands of dollars.

Proto Labs offers free quick-turnaround molds to deserving projects. We believe fcobcn’s case is such a project, so we’re applying for a Cool Idea Award. If the project wins, they’ll donate the molds to us and we’ll but a few thousand cases.

Follow below for our ‘beta’ application form responses. Comments and literary advice welcome.

Continue reading “Application to Proto Labs for a Protomold Bus Pirate case”

Bus Pirate week, day 3 – cases and enclosures

This week is dedicated to Bus Pirate development. Today we looked at Bus Pirate cases, past and future. Here’s some links mentioned in the video:

Tomorrow we’ll do our Bus Pirate demo from Home Camp4, using v4 hardware’s on-board I2C EEPROM. Don’t miss:

Grab the latest v6 firmware release candidate here.

NBW-SDR: NBitWonder software defined radio

NBitWonder writes:

Over at NBitWonder, we have been working to develop a software-defined radio for a few months. Last weekend, the radio received its very first signals. There is a short writeup and demonstration video at our website.

This is quite similar to Jeri Ellsworth’s design in that is uses a Tayloe detector and some DSP to recover a signal. This design, though, achieves frequency agility using a DS1085 programmable oscillator module — it can be set from 8kHz to 133MHz in 10kHz steps. A CPLD performs clock division, level conversion, and quadrature clock generation, and feeds a high-speed bus multiplexer that actually does the demodulation. After some simple subtraction performed by a high-bandwidth op-amp, the in-phase and quadrature signals are passed to a PIC32 via a low-pass anti-aliasing filter. Inside the PIC, an FFT is used to filter the signal to any of several possible bandwidths, then an IFFT is taken and demodulation is performed in the time domain. Finally, an audio signal is reconstructed via PWM, low-pass filtered, and sent to the output.

Modes of operation are set by firmware, and are slated to include AM, USB/LSB, FM, and an unprocessed IQ output. Check out NBitWonder’s Github page and their project forum for more info and code.

Via the contact form.

#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”

USB Analog/digital logger

Arhi started started working on a USB/UART analog and digital logger:

It’s a simple USB logger that can log 12 analog and 3 digital channels + data from MAX6675 (thermocouple driver). It sends the data via usb or uart.

We think this is a very useful device that has a place on every bench top. We often find ourselves needing to monitor various signals at low speeds, and breaking out a scope or a DSO is too much of a hassle.

Arhi promises to write up the firmware once he has time for it.

Via the forum.