Our friends at Adafruit have posted this tutorial on using SD and Micro SD cards with Arduino. This is a great resource for beginners looking to expand their knowledge as well as advanced users who want to brush up on microcontroller interfacing skills.
They use the latest version of the Adafruit SD Card library available on Github along with the Adafruit MicroSD card breakout board.
We know, we’ve been down this road before with the ARISSat-1, but this time they say it’ll work.
Test transmissions from ARISSat-1/KEDR are scheduled to begin four days prior to deployment at 19:15 UTC on July 30 and then continue until 1430 UTC on July 31.
The satellite will be connected to an external antenna mounted on the ISS during testing. During the test ARISSat-1/KEDR will be in LOW power mode, this means that it will transmit about 40 seconds and then shut down for 2 minutes and then transmit for again for 40 seconds.
For details on monitoring this Amateur Radio Satellite, go to the Southgate Amateur Radio News site.
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?
The CUI32 is a PIC32 USB development board. Markus updated the design to use as an Commodore sound chip emulator and SID music file player. Now that re-design has become the CUI32Stem, and it will soon be available at Seeed:
SeeedStudio is currently producing a prototype of the board and if everything goes well, they will have the CUI32Stem in their stock relatively soon (or so I do hope) :)
Congratulations to Markus for getting a project fabbed!
We enjoyed watching the SID hybrid player evolve in the project log forum. Confused what this is all about? Catch the latest video below the fold.
fcobcn built a free Bus Pirate 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.
Another translation from Nick: Russian Bus Pirate user interface.
All translations are appreciated. The wiki is open to anyone with a forum account.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Sorry, due to a stupid Ian mistake we ran Free PCB Sunday instead of Facebook PCB Friday. Sunday will happen later this weekend. Comment here on Facebook for free PCBs.
Every Friday we give away some extra PCBs via Facebook. The #5 and #11 people who comment on this post at Facebook get a free PCB. More PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday and the blog every Sunday.
This week we’re giving away two PCB codes. Be the first two commenters and you get the PCB. Pick your own PCB from the free PCB drawer.
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:
Continue reading “Free PCB coupon via Facebook comments #5 and #11”
Today we announce the winner of the OpenPicus WIFI development board. There were lots of creative project ideas, thanks for your submissions.
Congratulations to Tom, his idea for WIFI-controlled theater props scored him the OpenPicus starter kit:
I build custom lighting, props and scenic effects for the theatre.As these things are very mobile on the stage, it’s a real challenge getting control signals to them.This looks like a neat solution for controlling these complex props via DMX, over ArtNet, over WiFi – all of which are common in our theatrical environments.While the IDE will speed development, since I’m already a PIC user, I look forward to some lower level hacking too!
Thanks to OpenPicus for the freebie.
Every time we get a press release we ask for free stuff to give you, we’ll try to have a giveaway at least every-other week.
Chris from PyroElectro writes us with this useful project to communicate serial data over an infrared link.
Here’s an article that explains how to create a wireless infrared transmitter using an IR LED and a wireless IR receiver using a phototransistor to make a communication system. Asynchronous serial is transmitted over this link at 9600 BPS. Two PIC 18F452’s are used to transmit and receive the data.
Get the details, schematic and C source code at PyroElectro.
Seeed is testing a new Grove kit for hacking toys. Grove is a set of pre-soldered sensors that plug into an Arduino shield. It’s an easy way to build a project without touching a soldering iron.
They need some beta testers so they’re having a contest. The top prize is a $200 store coupon:
We’re going to launch a new Grove Toy kit. It’s for you to hack or DIY your toys to fit with your own personality. We choose several components that are suitable to Toy spirit from our existing Grove category. Everything seems fine but we do need more real-world applications and step-by-step instructions to inspire the folks. So, here’s your chance.
To assist in understanding and using the new Arduino PID Library, Brett Beuregard has put together a tutorial entitled Improving the Beginner’s PID – Introduction.
Via DIY Drones.
We have been experimenting with the Touchstone semi TS1001 ultra-low power, low voltage op-amp demo board, and the results are in.
For our tests, the board inverting op-amp circuit was powered by a solar cell from a calculator with two 0.5v zener in series. The total supply was about 950mV, well below the operating range of most op-amps. It consumes 1.3 micro watts when the input is driven by an 1Khz 500mV square wave.
From our initial testing we found a usable bandwidth of about 1KHz, this op-amp appears best suited for low power sensors. Replicating a sine wave (blue signal) up to about 850hz is possible, any further and you end up with a more triangular wave as shown above (yellow signal).
Keep reading for more before and after signal comparisons.
Continue reading “TS1001 low power, low voltage op-amp review”
Humanoido from LetsMakeRobots posted the above photo of a major project involving Parallax Propeller chips.
Advanced Robot Big Brain 1-year in the making. Over 100 Parallax Propeller chips and over 100,000 enhanced chip processors. Controls 3,200 robots or I/O. SuperMicroController. Theoretical speed over 16,000 MIPS (left brain) and over 1 TeraFLOP (right brain).
Only one photo could upload. It shows the EXOskeleton. Photo #2 not shown has many solderless breadboards and lots more Parallax Propeller chips with high density wiring.
For all the details, check out Fill the Big Brain forum posts at Parallax.
Florin was tired of wasting batteries every time he forgot to turn off his multimeter. He hacked together an auto-shutdown:
I bought this multimeter(Minipa ET-870C) a while ago for $17, great value. I got it because its nice to have around multiple meters for when you wanna measure both input and output voltage/current. I believe it was advertised to have an auto-off feature for 15 mins but it didn’t. This eventually lead to many drained batteries because I often forgot to turn it off after using it. So during a boring weekend when the weather outside was bad I decided to add this nice feature to the meter. I knew it had to be a small circuit to be able to fit inside the multimeter so I picked the tiny25 the smallest micro I had around.
rsdio writes: this was announced on April 1, and somehow I missed. I’m sure they’re all gone by now, but the links still seem to work
The MAXADCLite evaluation (EV) kit is based on the MAX11645 ADC, which integrates a multiplexor, FIFO, sequencer, and reference, all for the same price as a competitive stand-alone ADC. To maximize design flexibility, the MAX11645 is also pin and firmware compatible across resolution, sample rate, and channel count. Packaged in a tiny 1.9mm x 2.2mm WLP, the MAX11645 consumes only 2µW of power in active state and uses only 200nA in sleep state.
Only 1000 kits are available for this free offer, so click fast! Get your free EV kit now
Thanks for the tip rsdio!
“Hello,
Recently I start to read dangerous proto blog and I must say that I am a fan of your site and your projects. I am not a PIC guy but recently I decided to make a bus pirate using a free pcb I got through the site.
I have a question to ask. Which programmer should I buy to program?? Pickit3or Pickit2??
From searching in net, Pickit2 seems to contain a useful logic analyzer and is cheaper. Is there similar feature in pickit3?? Does i really need to buy pickit3??Thanks
K”
Head to eBay, buy a PICkit2 clone. It will program AND debug most PIC chips. Catch a deal and you can get one for $25 shipped
PICkit2, and ICD2 if you feel posh, is one of the pros of PIC microcontrollers. One cheap debugger not only programs most chips, but also lets you single-step code and read memory locations. Recently, while exploring various online forums, I stumbled upon a discussion about 꽁머니 사이트, which surprisingly led to a thread about optimizing debugging techniques for PIC microcontrollers. The insights shared there reinforced the importance of tools like PICkit2 for debugging, especially for those of us who aren’t natural coders and rely heavily on step-by-step code execution to identify and fix bugs that would otherwise be impossible to find.
Today is the last day for the OpenPicus Nest starter kit giveaway. If you’d like one just leave a comment with a project idea. We’ll give it away later in the day.
The GNU Radio project has announced plans for their first conference, to be held September 14-16, 2011 at the University of Pennsylvania. What is GNU Radio?
GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides the signal processing runtime and processing blocks to implement software radios using readily-available, low-cost external RF hardware and commodity processors. It is widely used in hobbyist, academic and commercial environments to support wireless communications research as well as to implement real-world radio systems.
Registrations are being taken at the con’s website. There is a $100.00 fee.
Every Wednesday we highlight a component from the updated partlist. This week: buttons and switches.
Let’s talk buttons. The 6mm button is the classic button. It comes in surface mount and through hole versions.
The 6mm surface mount button, DTSM-6 seems to be one package name, has nice beginner-friendly pads that are easy to solder. It comes in a pick and place friendly reel, but it must exceed the specs of most machines. On the Logic Sniffer we noticed that the 6mm SMD buttons were hand-soldered, and SparkFun, Seeed, and Adafruit all use a smaller button in their designs.
A 5.2mm button (or 4.8mm, or many similar sizes) seems way more common in pick and place assembled designs. The smaller size and lower profile must be better for automated assembly, but they are more slightly more expensive.
Footprints for both bottom types are in the Dangerous Prototypes Eagle parts library.
Looking forward to the upcoming Defcon 19 conference, we note that Gibson open source software will be used there to monitor traffic.
Dan Klinedinst, the project owner, writes:
Some of you have seen the “Gibson” software, which models a network in 3D and shows security events on that network in real time. The code, as well as some presentations, videos and pathetically little documentation are at gibson3d.org. I’ve been invited to use Gibson to monitor the network traffic at Defcon (defcon.org) in August and display it in real time in the contest area. If you’re not familiar with Defcon, it’s the largest hacker convention in the U.S. and has been described as “the most hostile network on Earth.
Check out the Gibson project webpage.
Via HackPittsburgh (who assisted in coding this project!)
