Here’s a quick way to how to adapt an SOIC surface mount chip to replace a through-hole part. You can do this with stuff on your bench: a DIP IC socket, a few wires, and a wood scrap.
Beautiful? Heck no. (More like slimy but satisfying.) But finding a way to get your circuit board to light up without a few more days for the “right” chip to show up can be a wonderful thing indeed.
Via Adafruit.
Zeta built a Cypress PSOC 3/5 programmer with the EZ-USB-FX1 IC:
The First touch kits have an embeded programmer based on EZ-USB FX2LP so I wanted to clone it. I didn’t have any FX2LP and didn’t want to wait a week to get some on my mailbox, but I happen to have some FX1 chips and since the FX2LP claims to be pin/funtion/code compatible with FX2 that in turn is compaible wih the FX1, I’ve decided to built it based on the FX1 and some pasives I had on my parts drawer..
We think that programmable system-on-chip ICs from Cypress are cool. They are basically microcontrollers with programmable analog and logic gate arrays built in. The development boards and programers for these chips can be expensive, which makes Zeta’s cheap design attractive.
Via the forum.
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:
Continue reading “Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters”
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week:
Coming this week:
What are you hacking this week?
Seeed Studio has started posting videos. This week they demo the Rainbowduino Cube, a color 3D LED matrix based on the Arduino.
Mandarin is spoken, with English in subtitles. This is an idea Eric from Seeed mentioned when were on the subway to NYC Resistor this summer. If you’re learning Mandarin with Adafruit these videos would be great geek-vocab practice.
Strangely, you may find several videos about Seeed Studio and Seeed’s products on the Internet, but guess what none of them was produced by us. It’s weird, isn’t it? We skipped the easiest way to communicate with the folks. More importantly you would like to watching a video rather than reading a tediously manual paper. So, here we are. Seeed Studio is going to produce videos!
Markus added bluetooth to his Hybrid SID player:
I thought it would be nice to have my SID player hardware located next to the stereo equipment and have its audio output connected to it. Having an USB cable running to the laptop from which ACID 64 sends the SID data isn’t convenient, so I looked for a simple wireless solution.
This project continues to absorb new parts, just like a Trapper Keeper.
Via the forum.
Here is another Microchip TQFP 100 breakout board built by Haley0918, similar to the board we posted yesterday.
The PIC IC and RESET button are placed on the top side of the board. The voltage regulator, quartz crystal, and all the decoupling capacitors are on the bottom.
It was designed for the dsPIC33FJ256MC710 with digital signal controller peripherals, but it will work with most PICs in the same package. Schematic and PCB files are provided if you want to build your own.
Via the forum.
Sky built a free Bus Pirate v3.5 PCB.
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.
Robotgrrl posted a link to her coding project Matatino, “a Cocoa framework for Mac that provides a straight-forward way to communicate with your Arduino through its serial connection.” Matatino is an open source project.
You can learn how to add Matatino to your Xcode project at Robotgrrl’s Apps4Arduino site.
Via the Arduino blog.
xQFP breakout boards are back in stock at Seeed Studio.
Raj made an all through-hole development board for 8bit PIC microcontrollers. Feature list is quite impressive:
The PIC, as well as all the peripherals, are broken out to female headers. You simply use wire jumpers to make connections.
Via the forum.
Colin found cheap 3” touchscreen LCDs on eBay for just $7. He bought a bunch of them and developed a breakout board.
This LCD doesn’t have an integrated controller, you need to use a high power microcontroller to drive the LCD and run the touchscreen. Colin used a PIC32 and the pinout, protocol, and firmware provided by CafeLogic.
Via the forum.
If you’ve looking for open source 3D modeling software that focuses more on the CAD and less on the artistic/game dev aspects, consider Openscad. Think design of machine parts, not movie animation. It takes a different approach than other 3D modeling software.
OpenSCAD is not an interactive modeler. Instead it is something like a 3D-compiler that reads in a script file that describes the object and renders the 3D model from this script file (as in the example above). This gives you (the designer) full control over the modeling process and enables you to easily change any step in the modeling process or make designs that are defined by configurable parameters.
Visit the Openscad website to download the software today.
Small character LCDs can show new mail stats, system performance, news feeds, and more. The USB and Serial LCD backpack connects HD44780-compatible character LCD screens to your USB (or serial) port.
Almost every open source hardware shop sells some type of serial LCD backpack. Our goal is to build an update to the classic serial LCD backpack, something better suited to a USB-centric world:
This was one of the most popular free PCBs ever. Now you can get one assembled for $16.95 at Seeed Studio.
Hardware design overview
The LCD Backpack uses a PIC18F2550 8bit microcontroller (IC1) with USB. It’s powered directly by the USB 5v supply. For extra protection, we added a 500mA fuse (F1).
An HD44780-compatible character display, with our without backlight, connects to the long header on the edge of the PCB. The LCD backpack uses the full 8bit data mode, both read and write are supported.
Adjustment
A 100ohm potentiometer, labeled BACKLIGHT, adds a resistor to the backlight if your LCD needs it.
The backlight is software dimmable. The PIC hardware pulse-width modulator controls the backlight through transistor (T1) with a 1K base resistor (R2).
Screen contrast is adjusted through a 10K potentiometer (CONTRAST). An optional hack enables software contrast adjustment. We didn’t know if software contrast adjustment would work for every LCD, so we used a solder jumper to make it a hackable feature.
Read the complete hardware design overview.
Works with LCD Smartie, LCD Proc
LCD Smartie is a Windows application that shows news, email, system information, and more on an external LCD screen. The USB and Serial LCB backpack works with LCD Smartie in ‘Matrix Orbital’ mode. LCD Smartie is free, open source (GPL) software.
See LCD Smartie configuration instructions.
Linux users can check out LCD Proc.
Get one
Get one for $16.95 at Seeed Studio. Get USB and the latest features for the same price as a serial-only LCD backpack.
Nabil programed the STM32F4 DISCOVERY development board using the Bus Blaster JTAG debugger and open source OpenOCD software:
My initial research lead me to texane’s github where he created a linux version of ST-LINK. It doesn’t support the STM32F4 yet, but there is a fork which is making good progress. I couldn’t get either to work, which is when I turned to OpenOCD and Bus Blaster. A few minor modifications to the STM32F2 scripts and success. First time using the Bus Blaster and couldn’t be happier.
The STM32F4 uses a 32bit ARM Cortex M4.
Via the forum.
Here’s a pic of the new 32bit PIC32 microcontroller in a DIY friendly though-hole package. Shaos received a free sample from Microchip and shared this pic in the forum.
Microchip is not alone, NXP is also releasing an 32bit ARM in hobbyist-friendly packaging.
Andrianakis built an autonomous data logging system using a GSM/GPRS cell phone modem module to transmit data to a online server. It’s designed to read wind velocity for a future wind power station installation.
A PIC16F877A communicates with a SIM900 GSM/GPRS module, and reads sensor values. By using a battery and a solar cell charger, it can be deployed for long periods without intervention. All the hardware and software is open source.
Via the contact form.
After noticing that most of Microchip’s microcontrollers in TQFP 100 packages use the same basic pinouts, we decided to make a breakout board to take advantage of it.So far we checked support for PIC24F, dsPIC33E, and PIC32 devices, and with the exception of the programing header all the 100-pin chips are compatible with the board.
The board has a 3.3V regulator that powers the PIC, and all the PIC power pins have a 0.1uF decoupling capacitor. Power can be supplied over USB or via an external 5v source. We included a solder jumper on the PIC’s ENVREG pin to enable/disable the internal 2.5volt supply for the PIC core. An LED indicates power.
Two quarts crystals are provided, one at 20Mhz for the internal clock, and one at 32.768Khz for real time clock use. 2 LEDs are provided for user IO.
Programming connection 3 is brought to a header, and a RESET button is connected to the MCLR pin. Using ICD3 is a bit of a bug, it makes the board incompatible with PIC32 devices that don’t the third programing connection. The board should still work with them, but programing will have to be done from the side headers. In the final version this will be corrected.
We plan to use this board to quickly prototype future designs using the TQFP 100 Microchip uCs.
Via the forum.
Eagle has released beta Version 6 of their CAD software for public testing. They note:
We suggest that only users who already have experience with previous versions of EAGLE participate in the beta test. If you are new to EAGLE please use our current release version.
CadSoft notes that the beta version is NOT for production use, and that any files written with this beta version of EAGLE will not be loadable with previous program versions!
Visit CadSoft’s Betatest site to download the software.
BFX tipped us to this video of professional soldering techniques in the comments of our Soldering the 8bit PIC SchmartBOARD post.
The video shows how to prepare, solder, and clean a board with SMT components. Amongst other things, this tutorial shows how to solder one side of a fine pitch QFP device in one swoop of the soldering iron.
Via the comments.
