Today we have 2 more sponsors joining us,
Parrallax has provided us with a Boe-Bot Robot Kit and 2 BASIC Stamp Activity Kits.
Xess has thrown in a XuLA-200 board with a VGA interface board.
The prizes could be yours, all you have to do is submit an entry in the open 7400 logic Competition.
tayken built a free USB IR Toy v2 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 an IR Toy v2 for $22.05, including world wide shipping.
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:
You can get a Bus Blaster v2 for $34.95.
Continue reading “Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters”
Facebook free PCB Friday is on the way. Don’t forget to share your current project in the comments or the forum.
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week:
Coming this week:
What are you hacking this week?
fcobcn’s milled Bus Pirate case prototype is a work of art. The final touch are light-pipes for each LED. We’re going to get a quote on an injection-molded version from Protomold.com.
Via the forum.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
The 7400 competition is gaining momentum. We could really use some nice banners and graphics to promote it. Any artists out there?
Greg Crawford at Citizen Scientists League has written a three-part series on the Netduino. In Part 1 he describes the Netduino’s features and compares this board to the more familiar Arduino.
In Part 2, Greg details how to interface the Netduino with the SPI bus, and provides some C# code for this purpose.
Part 3 continues with a detailed description of using a MAX6675 breakout with the Netduino in a datalogging project coded in C#.
This series is comprehensive and makes interesting points for anyone considering working with a Netduino.
octal and several others tipped us to Adafruit’s new 0805 and 0603 resistor and capacitor books:
Just to let you know that Adafruit is selling two new SMD parts kits in 805 and 603 sizes, each binder having both resistors and capacitor priced around 28 euros only
The nice thing is that on each package you get a good distribution of the resistors, with more 1K and 10KΩ and fewer of the really high values.
Sometimes I need to make a quick prototype with a part that doesn’t match any of my proto PCBs, and I end up carving blank copper-clad with an Xacto knife (see attached photo of Cree XLamp XP-E LED with a center heatsink pad that would short out one or both power terminals, if I used protoboard with 0.1″ pads).
Via the forum.
We are pleased to announce that Jayson Tautic CEO of TAUTIC ELECTRONICS LLC, will be one of the judges for the Open 7400 logic Competition. there will be more to come in the following week, so stay tuned, and get your entry in.
This case by Madox is up on Thinkiverse.
More cool DIY cases here.
Via the comments.
Get a Logic Sniffer for $50, with free worldwide shipping.
This is a simple voltage booster based on discrete components:
The circuit is excellent and works down to 0.6V. It requires about 0.9V to start. I’ve got efficiencies of 80% using high gain transistors.
Thanks Rohit! Via the forum.
Here’s an entry in the Open 7400 Logic competition: Moving dot running light
Here’s my entry for the “Open 7400 Logic Competition”. Logic ICs are for timing, and nothing demonstrates timing better than LEDs, and Red-Green LEDs are frosting on the cake.
Check out the video after the break. Continue reading “7400 competition entry: Moving dot running light”
This video shows “The Annoying IKEA LAMP” or SM-1, ArduinoArts’ finalist entry for SeeedStudio’s Grove Toy Kit contest:
Headed by industrial engineer Javier Lander, the project weds two servos (one in the base and one in the lamp), sensors for motion and sound, a three axis accelerometer, LED light and audio board to an Arduino shield, springing the modjob to programmed states of alarm and irritation.
You can read all the details about this project from the ArduinoArts SM-1 page.
Thanks Hoz! Via the contact form via Engadget.
arhi posted the final update on his universal soldering pencil driver:
This is I think “final” version of this design. Not much to be done here (except change the mcu and then push more functionality to it). It works, the Solomon handle works perfectly (Ktype thermocuple sensor) and the HAKKO (ptc sensor) works satisfactory (I’m not sure the offset and slope values are correct as I’m unable to measure temperature of the tip reliably in 200-400C range).
MakerBot Industries has a brand new online video series hosted by ME! Annelise Jeske – MakerBot’s Video Superstar! And it is AWESOME!
Let me take you on a virtual adventure to an Afro Punk head-scanning party, watch how we MakerBot the heads of Angelo Moore (of Fishbone) and comedian Reggie Watts, get some tips and tricks for using ReplicatorG, and have some fun with a few Thingiverse creations. You may or may not also get to hear some of yoda’s wisdom and watch me swing a sword around.
Via Adafruit.
We are pleased to announce that the Gadget Factory is now sponsoring the open 7400 logic Competition,
This is right up any FPGA enthusiasts alley, Dangerous Prototypes is having an Open 7400 Logic Contest contest to see who can put together the best project utilizing 7400 series logic chips. There are many great prizes including an Arcade MegaWing with aPapilio One 500K FPGA board that we will be giving away as a contest sponsor.
Get your entry in, and these prizes could be yours.
A few weeks ago we posted an editorial about the lack of complete open source support for Microchip’s chipKIT Arduino-compatible hardware. Marc from Microchip writes:
We’ve been reading the blogs and comments, and do agree with you. Though we are a corporation, with a lot of suits (not really, actually I think we have a policy against suits), we know the community has been and still is a large part of why Microchip is successful today. We put our best code forward, but we know it has usage limitations. Clearly this is an area where we can do better. The many points made in the blogs were taken to heart. So, we set up a meeting with our management team yesterday, and both our CEO and COO joined us because they too think this is important. Really, we weren’t just playing Frisbee golf as you might have thought. We understand why you guys are upset and this is an issue we need to address. Bottom line, we can’t release our existing stacks because we have contractual obligations to many of our customers that prevent us from making them open source.
So how about this: We offer a prize for anyone who writes these stacks for the community. To get started, the two that we want to target are the TCP/IP and USB stacks. Heck, who better to write these than the experts in the community? The goal is that the entries would be compatible with the chipKit MAX32 (PIC32MX795F512L). Digilent Inc. will help us decide which stack first meets the requirements. For our part, we will pony up the prize and provide technical support for those who want to get involved.
Thanks to everyone who posted and I’ll follow up with additional details shortly.
This is a great development. Your comments made it to the top of Microchip, and they’re making an effort to engage the community. Until now open drivers weren’t even on the radar. While they aren’t going to open source their own drivers, neither have competitors like Atmel – there are simply more community-produced USB and TCP drivers for the AVR.
Dangerous Prototypes will join in with a $100 cash bounty to the developers of the USB and TCP/IP stack used. We’ll bring you further details about the Microchip prize when we hear them.
A big thanks to Adafruit, Make, NBIT wonder, and everyone else who covered this.
Via the comments.
There’s a new version of WinLIRC and the WinLIRC plugin for the USB Infrared Toy.
Just uploaded a new winlirc version, with yet another updated plugin for the IR Toy. It requires the latest firmware. Not tested it with the old one firmware, it might work but I wouldn’t advise it. Needs testing in case of cataclysm, but it should be stable :) Enjoy.
Here’s some tutorials on using the USB IR Toy with WinLIRC to command your computer with a remote control.
Via the forum.
Here’s an entry in the Open 7400 Logic conpetition: A nixie tube clock.
My entry for the competiton is a nixie tube clock where all the logic is in 4000 series chips (and the tube drivers are 7400 series!).
