Chris from PyroElectro informs us of a new project he’s posted on his blog.
The SN754410 is a motor controller made by Texas Instruments. Don’t let its tiny size fool you, it is very capable, very simple and very powerful. This tutorial will use the SN754410 to show you how to control two motors independently and accurately.
Via the contact form.
The winners of TS9001 op-amp demo boards are Ronan:
I would like one of those! This is exactly what I need to make my graphical On-screen-display. Right now I have to use a normal comparator and a resistor divide “reference”.
and Zaharia:
I want to make a DIY user interface for my power source. TS9001+PIC18F+GLCD
Great ideas! Thank you for participating.
Stay tuned, we’ll have another giveaway planned for next week too.
Moser from ReiBot has developed a simple project for using an Arduino along with an LM399 and several discrete components to measure inductance. He says:
So you need to make or measure an inductor, but you don’t have an oscilloscope or signal generator? Measuring inductance with a handful of cheap common parts is certainly possible. I’ve verified this method is accurate with a scope from 80uH to 30,000uH, but it should work for inductors a bit smaller or much larger.
You can get more project details as well as the Arduino code (in a PDF) at ReiBot.org.
Via Adafruit.
sqkybeaver took over the embedded Linux board routing and released an updated PCB. Here’s the wiki for this project.
Via the forum.
After two years with a default look, Dangerous Prototypes finally has as new theme. It’s based on Starkers blank theme with custom styling.
Here’s our design goals, stolen shamelessly from our favorite sites:
If you notice any bugs, annoyances, or just hate the new design, please hit us up in the comments below. Compliments welcome too. The forum, wiki, and free PCB store will get the same header and color scheme in the coming weeks. All the updated themes will be released under the GPL.
Here’s a couple opportunities to get free PCB coupon or two. Make a banner for your favorite project, free PCB day, whatever, and you’ll get a free PCB code if it runs on the blog. We also need a dedicated organizer to clean up that mess of categories over here on the left. That could be worth a free project too.
A huge thanks to Robert for the amazing theme. This is the first big thing we hired-out instead of doing in-house. The random schematic symbols in the title line and microphone over the comments were a total surprise. There’s some other Easter Eggs out there too.
SineWave built a free MMA7455L accelerometer breakout board. We’re always surprised how popular these PCBs are. Nice use of solder paste and stenciling.
Turned out pretty awesome and they work great. Used an overhead transparency as a stencil.
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 the MMA7455L breakout board for $15 at Seeed Studio.
Today is the last day for the Touchstone Semi TS-9001 analog comparator+reference evaluation board giveaway. Leave a comment here if you’d like one.
Every Wednesday we highlight a component from the updated partlist. This week: regulators.
This week’s part: voltage regulators. We try to use the cheap 150mA voltage regulators in SOT-23 package whenever possible. These are cheap (from 25 cents in 1s) and super resilient to shorts, over temperature, and over load. 150mA is enough for the vast majority of our projects, if we need more power we bump it up to a 800mA SOT-223. For lots of power (1A+), and/or high input voltages, we reach for the DPAK or D2PAK regulators.
Unfortunately there’s no standard part number for most regulators. We usually find new models by searching for “LDO” and the voltage (eg “LDO 3.3v”). There’s multiple models listed for common values on the wiki, they are usually interchangeable.
The post interface is giving us problems since the theme update, this week’s partlist post will be cut a bit short. Please fill in the gaps in with more tips in the comments.
Package guidelines:
Joel Murphy and Yury Gitman of pulsesensor.com are developing an Arduino compatible pulse sensor.
“Pulse Sensor” is a well-designed plug-and-play heart-rate sensor for Arduino.
It can be used by students, artists, athletes, makers, and game & mobile developers who want to easily incorporate live heart-rate data into their projects.
After a few months of testing a gaggle of techniques, we developed what we think is an innovative pulse sensor. Our prototype (and accompanying code) plugs right into Arduino and easily clips onto a fingertip or earlobe. It’s super small too, button-sized with holes, so can be sewn into a garment as well. We’d like to manufacturer the actual pulse sensor, making it low-cost, and accessible for students, artists, and developers to use in their projects.
You can check out their Kickstarter page for more project info and updates.
Via Make.
Tomorrow we’ll give away two TS-9001 analog comparator+reference evaluation boards from Touchstone Semi. Leave a comment on yesterday’s post if you’d like one.
You can also get a sample directly from Touchstone:
We will send free evaluation boards to the next 10 people that request them. Just go to touchstonesemi.com/freesamples and ask for a TS9001 EV-Board or a TS1001 EV-Board!
Apart from being a swaggy promotion for this chip, we thing these samples are an easy (and free!) way to play with op-amps and comparators work without grabbing a soldering iron. It’s like a free educational experimenter’s board.
As the time for Defcon 19 nears we got to looking over last years videos and found this intro to Arduino for software guys. Dave King’s presentation is one of the better tutorials for programmers who want to learn the basics of the Arduino. An introduction for newbies, a refresher for the rest of us.
Above video is Part 1. The remaining three parts are linked below:
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
victzh posted picture of his DIY ECG using an Xprotolab mini-scope/logic analyzer in the project log forum.
Some time ago I bought an excellent toy – Xprotolab mini-scope/logic analyzer by Gabriel Anzziani.
I touched it signal legs, and immediately saw that it picks up 60Hz through my body. I looked around and found couple of simple and inexpensive ECG projects, which definitely could use such a nice mini-scope.
Via the forum.
We try to link the first mention of our projects and other common terms in every blog post. It takes a lot of time and makes blogging boring.
We developed Word Linker plugin to automatically link keywords in blog posts. It saves a ton of time for commonly linked terms. There are several plugins out there with similar functionality, but we weren’t happy with the quality of the code. We took care to optimize database use so there is only one call per post.
This plugin replaces the first instance of keywords in our posts automatically. It’s smart enough to leave already linked keywords untouched.
Here’s the SVN. We submitted it to the WordPress plugin database too.
Florin posted pictures of his Bus Pirate housing made from a Microchip sample box.
Microchip samples. What a blast from the past. Though we hear they might be sampling to .edu emails if you promise not to resell your samples on eBay.
Here’s some other user-submitted cases.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Every Tuesday we give away some extra PCBs via Twitter. This post was announced on twitter. The 8th and 20th person who retweet it get free PCBs. We changed the approach this week due to auto-retweeters grabbing boards first. Thanks for the heads-up on auto-retweeters JT! Love it, hate it? Let us know in the comments below.
This week we’re giving away two PCB codes. 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 to RT #8 & #20 @dangerousproto”
Jersagfast from The Custom Geek developed this tic tac toe game using an Arduino and a Adafruit 2.8″ TFT touchshield. He describes:
It’s pretty basic tic tac toe, and has score tracking, game logic (you can’t go twice in a row, and telling you if you win), and the ability to consume a chunk of time playing tic tac toe with my son. Below is the code, feel free to hack modify etc. If you play against a smart person (or yourself), you will have lots of Mosfet eye games!
Here is their link to the Arduino sketch code.
Via Adafruit.
The Luxembourg based syn2cat hackerspace has a system in place to provide members with information on the open/closed status of the space online or via an Android app. They call it OpenDuino, and it is more than a web based status monitor. OpenDuino also operates as a security system, allowing members to open and secure the building via wifi using their password. It even alerts via SMS when the garbage can needs emptied!
Touchstone semi sent us two TS-9001 analog comparator+reference evaluation boards to give away. Leave a comment on this post if you want one, and we’ll give them away on Thursday. Mention how you might use this part for bonus points.
The demo board contains two TS9001s – the push-pull TS9001-1 and the open-drain TS9001-2 – where each circuit is configured as a simple threshold detector with additional hysteresis.
If you are really interested in a demo board, they might send you a sample too.
nootropic writes: Guys, I did some pretty cool stuff with visualization of the dialog spoken in TV broadcasts. I accomplished this by decoding the closed caption stream (data embedded in NTSC broadcasts) and displaying it with a Processing program. Check it out…!
One of the coolest things you can do with the nootropic design Video Experimenter shield for Arduino is decode the closed caption data embedded in NTSC (North American) television broadcasts. I figured out how to do this and documented it in a another project, so if you want to understand all the details of how to capture and decode closed captions, refer to that project. With this project, I take it a step further and show how the spoken dialog embedded in a television show can be visualized on a computer in a “cloud” of words. This is the same type of cloud (often called a “tag cloud”) that you see on blogs, where the frequency of a particular word is reflected in the size of the word. More frequent == larger word.
Via the contact form.
JTR posted an alternate firmware for the Infrared Toy v2 that works with the IR widget client:
As you can see I have a working “IR widget” mode going with the IR TOY 2. This uses the QSE159 raw IR detector so it is only for the IR TOY 2. The other IR widget mode “remote control” uses the IR demodulator (TSOP34838) found on both the IR TOY 1&2 however I am not sure if I will persist with adding this mode. I am open to feedback on this issue. Have your say and quickly too as I really have to move on with this.
The software app for the IR widget mode is called IRScope V2 and is available from here
This firmware is running JTR’s latest open source USB stack for PIC microcontrollers, your feedback is appreciated. Test the new firmware using the normal bootloader procedure.
Via the forum.
You can get IR Toy v2 for $22.05, including world wide shipping.
