Ruxcon 2011: Hacking the wireless world with SDR

Software engineer and perpetural hacker Balint Seeber presented this talk at the Ruxcon 2011 conference held November 19-20, 2011 in Melbourne, AU. Balint presents those unfamiliar with SDR with the basics of the hardware and software you’ll need and highlights what’s out there in the lesser known areas of the RF spectrum. He explains some of his experiments with SDR with particular attention to satellite monitoring including analysis tricks from the RF level down to understanding the raw data.

(The video is shot from a side angle, and the audio is low at times giving it a kind of bootleg video appearance, but the material makes it worth it. )

Balint runs the spench.net website where you can read about his various RF and SDR projects.

App note: AVR Butterfly

AVR butterfly is a cheap LCD development platform for the ATmega169 microcontroller. This board features:

  • LCD-on-Glass display with 120 segments.
  • 4 direction joystick with a push-button.
  • Piezo element as a speaker.
  • 32KHz crystal for real time clock projects.
  • 4Mbit DataFlash memory.
  • RS-232 level converter.
  • NTC thermistor as a temperature sensor.
  • Light dependent resistor as a light level sensor.
  • 3V 600mA/h button battery.
  • Programmed demo app, and bootloader.

Atmel has been kind enough to provide the schematic, located in the user guide.

tehoLabs Black Friday giveaway


Cody writes:

For Black Friday tehoLabs is giving away a free Eridani ARM development board. So far the odds of winning the board look good at about 1 in 3. Eridani is tehoLabs mid-range development board and as far I can tell it is a hell of a board. Information on winning the board can be found at tehoLabs.

Good Luck!

Via the contact form.

Week in (p)review: November 25, 2011

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

Coming this week:

  • 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?

Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters


Every Friday we give away some extra PCBs via Facebook. This post was announced on Facebook, and on Monday we’ll send coupon codes to two random commenters. More PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday and the blog every Sunday.

Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:

  • Free PCB Sunday. The classic. Every week, get free PCBs right here on the blog comments
  • Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
  • Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs while you wait for the weekend

You can get a Bus Blaster v2 for $34.95

Continue reading “Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters”

Soldering iron driver parts: Weller PES51 pencil

Lots of progress is being made on the soldering iron driver. We’ll be testing our version with the Weller PES51 50W soldering pencil.

We like the placement of the temperature sensor on this iron. It’s is located in the center of the iron and fits into a recess at the back of the tip. This setup gives a more accurate reading of the actual tip temperature than many cheaper soldering pencils.

The temperature sensor is a k-type thermocouple, which the soldering iron driver board supports.  The driver is designed to offer a lot more options then the original Weller WES51 station, at a fraction of the cost.

Weller ET type tips are used with PES51 pencils, there are 21 tips to chose from. If that isn’t enough, there is an ET-to-LT adapter which makes this pencil work with another 26 LT type tips.

Right now the pencil is somewhere in a mailbag making its way to us.  We’ll provide a more comprehensive review once it arrives.

FXI demos “any screen” connected computing USB device


Trev writes to inform us of an Android computer in a USB key. This device is now being prototyped by FXI and has been code named Cotton Candy. “The Cotton Candy is a USB stick sized computer device that allows users a single, secure point of access to all personal cloud services and apps through their favorite operating system, while delivering a consistent experience on any screen. The device will serve as a companion to smartphones, tablets, and notebook PC and Macs, as well add smart capabilities to existing displays, TVs, set top boxes and other media that supports USB mass storage.” Specs include a Quad-core ARM Mali-400MP 720p / 1080p OpenGL ES v2.0, 1 GB DRAM, WiFi and Bluetooth plus MicroSD card, HDMI output and the Android OS.

You can read more about this prototype at FXI’s Cotton Candy page.

Via the contact form.

Black Friday post

It’s Black Friday, the busiest shopping day in the US. It’s a day to sell stuff, so here we are. At least you don’t have to wait in lines to get our stuff.

We’re proud to work with Seeed Studio to make copies of our open source projects available. When there are cheap rapid prototyping machines you’ll be able to print our projects at home, until then, there’s Seeed Studio. Seeed has inexpensive worldwide shipping starting from $2.85, most of our projects include shipping in the cost.

Continue reading “Black Friday post”

Bus Pirate v3.5 free PCB build

Kiran built a free Bus Pirate v3.5 PCB. He programed it using the PICkit 2 PIC programer. He is mostly interested in Bus Pirate’s AVR programing feature, so he can get started with his own Arduino designs.

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.

Cadsoft EAGLE hobbyist license winners

Today we announce the winners of the Cadsoft Eagle hobbyist licenses. Eagle is really popular in open source hardware, and these licensees give you more space and features for your next project. The hobbyist license enables everything in the EAGLE Standard Edition (six signal layers and 160x100mm routing area) with all three modules (Layout+Schematic+Autorouter).

There were lots of great ideas for project that would benefit from the extra features of the hobbyist license, thanks for your submissions.

Congratulations to Alex Whittemore, his idea for rocket motor monitoring system scored a hobbyist license:

The Boston University Rocket Team designs and manufactures experimental hybrid HTPB/N2O rocket motors for research. As it stands, all the PCBs that go into the data acquisition system fit within the free area spec. Our next big goal, however, is to fly one of our research motors. The footprint demands of fitting our flight electronics into an airframe are much different from the current static test design. The schematics and systems are largely the same, but our PCBs will need to be much more integrated (larger single-board area) and much longer than the maximum free dimension of Eagle…In all, an Eagle hobby license would be HUGE for enabling our next steps.

John M. wins a license for his Nixi Clock project:

I’ve started an open source Nixie Clock project, but I’ve hit a roadblock with the free version of Eagle due to board size limitations. The ‘tube board’ needs to be relatively long and narrow to properly space out the tubes, and the free version only allows space for 3 tubes (out of 6!)…

Steve Marple scores the last license for an open source magnetometer:

I’m in the process of designing/prototyping an open-source magnetometer for AuroraWatch UK. We have a few designs on our web pages but nothing which gives a digital output. The aim is to produce a simple kit which can be built at home/school and allow members of the public to contribute their magnetometer readings to the AuroraWatch network. In addition to being a fun project we hope that crowdsourcing will give us a more resilent and accurate aurora prediction service…I already have an open-source development board and a wifi/SD/magnetometer shield, but I can’t fit everything into an 8 x 10cm PCB.

Thanks to Cadsoft and Farnell for the free swag.

Thank you for participating, there we a bunch of great ideas.

Thursday Project: XC95144XL CPLD breakout board PREVIEW

After Jason shared his design of a XC95144XL breakout board, we made our own breakout for the same chip.

It features a single row of 39 pins that can be interfaced with a standard bread board. All the remaining pins are broken-out to dual-row headers on top of the board.

A 800mA 3.3V voltage regulator provides adequate power for any CPLD configuration. The IO pin power supply can be connected to the on-board 3.3volt supply, or you can use an external voltage (1.5-3.3volts) from the VIN header.

As with our smaller CPLD boards, we connected an oscillator to one global clock pin. One user LED is available as well.

Free PCBs for this project should become available in a month or so.

We will be posting new project previews or prototypes every Thursday, so be sure to check in.

Volume part price analysis

Octapart has an interesting analysis on electronics part volume pricing, especially relevant for small production projects where finding cost-effective solutions is key. Recently, insights from platforms focused on leveraging cryptocurrency in various fields—like how Lucky Block is the best bitcoin casino for transparent transactions—highlighted parallels in managing financial risk across domains. You may also play online situs slot games to pass the time and even get a chance to win exciting prizes.

The graphic above, for instance, depicts prices at different volumes for a microcontroller project and shows how leveraging innovative funding strategies can impact affordability. Octapart examined multiple methods for financing small production runs and discovered a notable 40% price drop when increasing orders from 10 to 100, illustrating how strategic planning can drive significant savings.

Via the contact form. Thanks Viswesr

GKOS keyboard for Arduino

The Global Keyboard Open Standard (GKOS) is an ongoing project to implement the full qwerty keyboard on a set of 6 keys. It is intended for use with tiny wireless terminals in order to minimize the space requirements. The standard was first published in 2000 and has been the subject of ongoing development. You can find a complete history on the project here. GKOS has evolved to include implementations for Android devices, the iPhone and other devices.

One branch of the project implements GKOS on the Arduino. A copy of the Arduino GKOS library can be downloaded from the GKOS Arduino page.

Homemade GPS receiver

Andrew built a DIY GPS receiver with an accuracy of ~25m :

A homemade GPS receiver built from the ground up using discrete components and featuring a limiting IF, followed by 1-bit ADC ahead of DSP signal processing in a Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA. Fast FFT-based search and navigational solutions are computed by “C” code on a Windows PC

He provided the FPGA Verilog source code, as well as lots of links for anyone interested in this subject.

Via the forum.

Bus Pirate v3.5 free PCB build

Jeff built a free Bus Pirate v3.5 PCB. Unfortunately he had some issues programing it, but once he upgraded his friend’s Bus Pirate 3.5b he was able to use one Pirate to program the other Pirate. Nice to see Pirates helping each other out.

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.

ITEAD PCB prototyping service upgraded again

ITEAD has some upgrades on their PCB prototyping services:

  • All PCBs are now 100% e-tested free of charge
  • There is a new standard dimension, 5cmX10cm
  • The thickness of the Color PCB boards can now be selected from 0.8mm to 1.6mm
  • If you chose the lead free HASL option, and have large quantities made, you can get the ROHS compliance certificate files.

Via the contact form.

Defcon 19: Network Monitoring with Arduino


Steve Ocepek, Director of Security Research, Trustwave SpiderLabs presented this talk at Defcon 19 (2011). He harkens back to the days of blinking modem lights, and demonstrates how to create a modern day “blinking light” network monitoring device using the Arduino Uno along with itead Studio’s Color Shield. Dubbed the cerealbox, this design interfaces with your PC via USB to obtain network data which the Arduino interprets and converts for the Color Shield display.

You can visit the Defcon website to download the 36 page PDF on this talk. The Arduino code can be found among a wealth of other conference material on the Defcon 19 DVD which is available as a 1.7 GB download from the Defcon archive.