Jaanus has been working on a subminiature Arduino clone which be believes is THE smallest.
Everybody are making Arduino clones. So I thought I should make THE smallest. I took smallest package atmega88 – qnf28 (5mm x 5mm). Routed smallest possible resonator and as much pads as i could fit on in.
His design provides SPI, UART, one LED and breaks out 4 analog and 1 digital IO pins.
Check out Projects of Jaanus for project details, design files and related docs.
Today our application for a booth at Maker Faire New York 2011 was accepted. We’ll be showing off the Thermal Tweeter and a few other toys. If everything works out, we’ll share the booth with Brian from Teho labs.
We’ll be there a few days early for the Open Hardware Summit, and a little eating. If you’re at either of the events give us a shout, we’ll have free PCB codes to give away.
At the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, hacker Adam Laurie revealed a flaw in the Square credit card reader hardware/software that allows the injected emulation of credit card data to fraudulently obtain funds. This discovery highlights the importance of robust financial security.
He inserted a different wire into the iPad’s headphone jack, so the software thought a dongle was plugged in. Then he modified some software he had already written for translating magnetic stripe data (we mentioned he’s a hacker, right?) and then typed in a credit card number. The data was converted to sound, and the app read the information as if a real card had been swiped. Then he could deposit funds into his Square account, which are delivered within a day.
The hack works because the dongles do not encrypt the data, which is sent to the iPhone as audio. It is expected that Square will correct this with the release of new encrypted hardware.
Via Popsci.
The EagleUP 3D rendering tool parts library just got bigger:
In the warehouse you can find additional parts to use in eagleUp. Click on the download link of the part you are interested in, then save it in your /models folder.
Thanks octal! Via the forum.
The Piwik tracking software we installed last Friday is already giving some interesting stats about visitors to the site. Here’s a summary of the web browsers we’re using. Looks like Firefox and non-IE alternatives rule the day.
tagno25 built a free USB IR Toy Shield 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.
You can get IR Toy v2 for $22.05, including world wide shipping.
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 we’re giving away coupon codes for the free PCB drawer to the first two commenters. Pick your own PCB.
Check out the new look of the free PCB drawer. Woot! Thanks Anthony.
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:
Wired magazine has published an online article summarizing the progress of the Maker movement in the last year. Tim Carmody observes that the Maker movement mirrors that of the growth of PCs and punk rock.
Culturally, it’s mostly already happened — just like Hüsker Dü and The Pixies figured out Nirvana’s basic hard-rock punk-pop template years before. Only now, the business and commercial components are catching up in a big way.
Via Adafruit.
Here’s a project from opencores by Tim Boscke known as MCPU. It creates a minimal CPU on a CPLD with at least 32 macrocells (such as our XC9572 CPLD Dev Board with 72 macrocells.) Tim describes:
MCPU is a minimal cpu aimed to fit into a 32 Macrocell CPLD – one of the smallest available programmable logic devices. While this CPU is not powerful enough for real world applications it has proven itself as a valuable educational tool. The source code is just a single page and easily understood. Both VHDL and Verilog versions are supplied. The package comes with assembler, emulator and extensive documentation.
You can download the code and documentation from the opencores site. (One time registration is required to download their code, but its free and provides access to loads of other projects and code samples.)
Read the MCPU PDF describing the project. It can be found in the web-uploads subdirectory of the extracted folder.
Get your XC9572XL dev-board for $15 today.
jyoung posted a new version of AVRDude and a Bus Pirate firmware that speeds AVR programming up to 40x:
I’ve spent the past few days implementing some changes to the Bus Pirate firmware and also to avrdude to increase the verify speed performance. Since I don’t have an ATmega2560, I’m unable to write suitable code to be able to handle changing pages, so this code will only work with an AVR that has less than 64k memory words.
Via the forum.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Freescale has a open source (GPL) TCP/IP protocol stack:
Fortunately, Freescale does have an embedded TCP/IP protocol stack, called—not surprisingly—FNET. Importantly, it is a complete, stand-alone implementation. That is, the code is self-contained and does not require an operating system or other libraries in order to function. FNET is written primarily in C, with an emphasis on the code being both modular and portable. Small sections of the stack are written in assembly language to take advantage of processor-specific optimizations. Best of all, FNET is open source (under the dual GNU LGPL/GPLv3 license with the linking exception), which means that you can adapt the source for your particular embedded product design.
Thanks Octal! Via the forum.
fcobcn built another free Bus Pirate v3.5 PCB, this time the version with the SSOP PIC.
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.
What do you call a typewriter modded to communicate digital messages over Skype? A Stype, of course! Daniel Huhndt describes it:
With the help of “some solenoids, relays, pushbuttons, some parts of a cheap keyboard, an arduino mega and a mac mini” , the typewriter can be used to send messages online. Whatever is typed into the paper gets sent, and the replies are automatically typed into the paper, archiving the conversation in the process. Whether our daily conversations are worth documenting is another matter.
Via Arduino blog.
Robert Diamond is with Alpha One Labs in Brooklyn. When they acquired a discarded LED sign sans control circuitry that they wanted to repurpose, they knew their work was cut out for them.
He writes:
After hooking it up and enabling it to display incoming tweets, a prototype was born. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to make your very own LED display board tweeting machine from scratch.
Via Wired.
Solder : Time watch, ripe for a remake with ultra low-power MCUs:
The Solder : Time is an original design watch kit that you solder and assemble yourself. Delivered as a through-hole kit, you solder the components to the PCB, and enclose it all in four layers of laser cut acrylic.
Via the forum.
tinito build a large two-wheel balancing robot:
tiltOne is a two-wheel balancing robot 90cm tall and able to carry up to 50kg of payload. There are lot of small balancing robots around, but size matters, especially when speaking of balancing a unstable system. Most of small robots “shake” around the vertical, with 5-10 degree oscillation, preventing them from falling down. But when size and weight increase, a 10 degree oscillation needs high acceleration (and resulting speed) to be recovered, and the robot will became a *too* dangerous prototype.
Check out the video after the break.
Via the forum.
rsdio writes: This thing puts out so much torque that it has to be run at 3/4 power to avoid slipping the clutch!
Features: Programmable current limit 100-1200 motor amps, automatic over-temperature current limit cut-back, water-cooled copper heat sink, low-loss IGBT modules, and motor overspeed limit.
Processor: Microchip PIC 16F877 This small yet powerful microcontroller runs at 5 MIPS and 20MHz with 8kb of onboard program FLASH memory. It also has two onboard 10-bit PWM generators, eight 10-bit ADC channels, and a UART interface.
Even if you’ve never attended the annual Defcon hacker con in Las Vegas, you know about the legendary electronic badges designed the last five years by Joe Grand. These prized gadgets spawned a whole cult of badge hackers, who sought tips and rumors of each years upcoming design so as to best prepare to meet the challenge.
This year the Defcon 19 conference currently underway has decided against using an electronic badge, opting instead for the titanium neckcharm pictured above. The explanation given essentially was that since other cons are now using electronic badges the concept was no longer unique.
Yawn… (sniffle, sniffle)….
Via thedroidguy.
You’ve probably seen aerial surveillance drones. You also probably know that GSM towers can be spoofed to fool unsuspecting users into connecting and having their phone security compromised. Well at this year’s Blackhat conference recently held in Las Vegas, security researchers Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins demoed their Wi-Fi Aerial Surveillance Platform (WASP) capable of GSM, WiFi and Bluetooth hacking on the fly (literally).
The WASP system, introduced by the pair at the at the Black Hat conference being held here this week, is upgraded version of a model unveiled at last year’s Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas.
The bright yellow, six-foot, 13-pound spy drone is capable of flying at altitudes of up to 22,000 feet and staying aloft for up to 45 minutes at a time.
Updates include the ability to function as a spoofed GSM tower to intercept cell phone conversations, and to intercept Bluetooth communications.
Via Computerworld.
Having to remember to take a vitamin or medication periodically can easily result in missed doses. If it’s a vitamin, probably no big deal. But if its a medical maintenance drug a missed dose can have serious consequences.
Ryan Blace from ibuildthings informs us of his latest project, a vitamin/pill reminder. He designed this Arduino controlled device to remind him to take a vitamin every three days. It maintains the proper timing and flashes an LED when its time to take a pill. The unit also senses when a bottle is removed so as to reset the timer. His code includes the “time” library, and can easily be modified for a different interval according to your needs.
You can read all the build details and get the source code from Ryan’s ibuildthings website.
Via the contact form.
