Being bored can sometimes inspire people to make cool stuff. Hak8or made these cool stick figures from his unused electronic parts. The hardest part of this build was soldering the tiny 0402 LEDs for eyes. You might also wanna check out these amazing sculptures made from unused PCBs.
Via the forum.
Schazamp posted a picture of his free PICqueño PCB build.
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.
After posting about SILtheDIL, we received another idea on how to break-out dual row headers. Victzh and Shaos made similar adapters that allow dual row headers to be used with a standard breadboard. They write: “it’s more like “DILtheDIP” or “DIPtheDIL” :)”.
Via the forum.
Jason continued to develop his 7400 contest entry the 80M direct conversion receiver, here is an update:
Finally, I addressed the lack of knowledge of what frequency is being tuned by adding a frequency counter. It is based on the XC9572XL breakout board from Ian and company. Coding the counter was a good learning experience for me as I learned how to squeeze more and more out of the limited logic available on the CPLD until I got it to do what I wanted. I tested the counter up to 100MHz and found that it tracked accurately to over 90MHz and then it started missing counts by the time it got to the mid-nineties. Still impressive given that the timing analyzer predicted a maximum of around 71MHz. Since I multiplexed LEDs (vintage HP calculator LEDs in the picture), I found that the display didn’t look good when I gated the counter at 100Hz as the update rate was too slow. So I dropped to a 5 digit display (99.999MHz) and a gate frequency of 1kHz which allows me to update each of the LEDs 200 times per second.
Via the forum.
Mike Szczys has written a tutorial on driving shift registers with SPI (AVR). He writes:
The thing is, the sample code in the datasheet won’t work by itself. Atmel didn’t address the fact that you must drive SS low (the latch pin) to start the SPI transfer. I wrote this post to help get folks up and running quickly.
Via the contact form.
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:
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Here is a video showing how to solder a PIC16F88 and a few discrete components on a 8bit PIC SchmartBoard.
The 8bit PIC SchmartBoard is a development board that supports many of Microchip’s 8bit microcontrollers in SOIC packages. It has a on-board crystal, 5v voltage regulator and 28 breakout pins for the PIC. It also sports a reset button, ICSP programing header, and a power LED.
Via Twitter.
Google+ introduced pages for organizations yesterday, you can now add +Dangerous Prototypes to your circle. You may have already added +Ian Lesnet in the past, but it looks like we can’t migrate the accounts.
Here is an interview with Eben from Rasberry PI, the $25 business-card sized Linux computer. The final product is due to be released at the end of this year. We think its really cool that the main goal of this project is to introduce young children to programing.
Via the contact form.
New packing boxes from Seeed Studio:
We used to stock almost all products in static-free plastic bags. Fair enough, it’s convenient and also easy for people to handling. However, the plastic causes many problems like environmental pollution, weak protection and bad product image I’d like to say. So, we started to prepare a new packing method with uline boxes since couple months ago. And now here it is!
If you’re looking for packaging for your business, then contact Manor Packaging and see the different types of packaging they offer.
Serge ported the RetroBSD version of the BSD 2.11 Unix operating system to the chipKIT MAX32 board. To get it started an SD card shield is needed. Features of the RetroBSD are:
- Small resource requirements. RetroBSD requires only 128 kbytes of RAM to be up and running user applications.
- Memory protection. Kernel memory is fully protected from user application using hardware mechanisms.
- Open functionality. Usually, user application is fixed in Flash memory – but in case of RetroBSD, any number of applications could be placed into SD card, and run as required.
- Real multitasking. Standard POSIX API is implemented (fork, exec, wait4 etc).
- Development system on-board. It is possible to have C compiler in the system, and to recompile the user application (or the whole operating system) when needed.
Via the comments.
ScottD tipped us to the LiPo Auto Balancer circuit featured in the Elektor magazine’s June 2010 issue.
When using multiple lithium ion/polymer batteries in series an auto-balancing circuit is needed to make sure all the cells charge equally. Due to slight differences in capacity, some cells will reach full charge before others. This effect increases after each charge/discharge cycle, and could lead to premature aging of a cell or even total breakdown.
The circuit provided in the article balances the charging of up to 4 cells connected in series. It compares the actual potential of a cell to a voltage divider that provides the average cell voltage. If a cell potential is greater then the average voltage the circuit starts discharging it, and if the potential is lower the circuit increases the charge rate of the particular cell.
Article is free but registration is required, also provided is the PCB layout PDF.
Via the comments.
In this presentation from last summer’s Defcon 19 conference, Jeff Bryner, Owner of P0wnlabs.com, demonstrates how to integrate the Kinect with Metasploit.
He uses the open source Blender 3D game engine to interface the Kinect hardware with Metasploit. This hack allows you to launch preassigned Metasploit attacks based upon your gestures as detected by the Kinect.
You can download the archive of the tool and supporting files from Jeff’s P0wnlabs website.
Carlos made a mosaic picture of the Arduino board from faces of the Arduino Playground group on LinkedIn. The mosaic is made from 190 individual profile pictures. A zoom-out video of the mosaic is featured below.
Via the contact form.
Brian made a tutorial on using eclipse for JTAG debugging LM3S based boards:
I have published in the docs section a guide on how to use Eclipse to do JTAG based hardware debugging for the LM3S development boards (Cygni, Eridani, Procyon).Eclipse is complex software which has a lot of power and settings, not all of which I know so if you like a setting different than what is in the guide feel free to leave a comment about it or contact me. Same goes if you notice a mistake in the guide.The screenshot above shows how the environment looks after following the guide.
Via the forum.
lpm0 writes to inform us of a 3D model he found of the MSP430 Launchpad at 43Oh. The 43Oh crew describes their design:
We were looking out for a 3D model of the Launchpad for one of our projects, but could not find any. So we whipped our own Sketchup Model. As far as we know, it is a good scale of the Launchpad and you could use it to model your project cases and enclosures. We are new to Sketchup. It took around three hours to learn and 5 hours to do the model. The components you see in the model are already available in the 3D warehouse. Both Google Sketchup and the models can be downloaded for free.
Via the contact form.
High intensity discharge ballasts, used in cars today, require a large set of analog controllers to ignite an HID bulb and reach steady-state operation. This reference design from Microchip describes how to make an HID ballast using a dsPIC and a few discrete components.
The reference design uses 9-16VDC and outputs 35W of steady state power and reaches an efficiency of over 85%. To handle changes in the input voltage and current, the reference design implements under voltage, over voltage, and over current protection. Using the reference design, a standard HID automotive bulb is able to reach steady state light output in under 150 seconds. Finally, since size is important in most ballast applications, the reference design uses planar magnetic to reach a small size of 9mm x 60mm x 80mm, commonly referred to as a “slim” ballast form factor.
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. Our PCBs are made through Seeed Studio’s Fusion board service.
This week two random commenters will get a coupon code for the free PCB drawer tomorrow morning. Pick your own PCB.
You get unlimited free PCBs now – finish one and we’ll send you another!
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times every week:
Radio Shack has announced that they will begin carrying Arduino boards and shields. The product list (with RS part numbers) includes the Arduino Uno REV 3 (2760128), Arduino Mega 2560 REV3 (2760127), Arduino Mega ADK (2760129), Arduino Ethernet Shield Without PoE Module (2760130), Arduino Motor Shield (2760131), the Arduino SD Shield (2760132) and the Arduino Proto Shield (2760140). No prices were listed on the RS website, but the hardware is expected in stores soon.
Portable devices need an uninterrupted power supply both when the circuit runs on a battery, and when it is connected to a charger. This app note shows how to design a portable power supply outputting 5volts and 3.3volts.
The MAX1811 battery management IC handles the charging of a lithium ion/polymer battery. A DC/DC boost circuit provides a constant 5V supply from a battery voltage between 3.2V and 4.2V. The 5V supply is dropped down to 3.3V using a simple linear voltage regulator.
If only a single 3.3V supply is needed, the boost circuit could be replaced by a DC/DC step up/down converter.
