Protostack dev-board and programmer winner

Today we announce the winner of the Protostack ATmega168A development board and USBasp programmer. There were lots of great project ideas.

Congratulations to oakkar7, his idea is to construct a digital signal generator with a key pad and LCD based on the AVR DSS:

AVR DDS signal generator V2.0 is a firmware based DDS signal generator which uses slightly modified Jesper’s DDS algorithm… Signal generator has two outputs – one for DDS signal and another for high speed [1..8MHz] square signal

Thanks to Protostack for the free swag, and thank you for your comments.

Stay tuned, we’ll have more freebies soon.

Plunify online FPGA compiler conference call

Plunify is an online compiler for Altera and Xilinx CPLDs/FPGAs. The developers’ goal is to build an interface to instant license and computer resources for large FPGA projects. Download the MP3 to hear more about their start-up and some of the difficulties they face with compiler licensing.

We’re interested in Plunify because it gives programmable logic newbies a way to try simple CPLD development boards without downloading a 4gig compiler. Plunify added our CPLD tutorials to their demo projects, and made a how-to video. We put together a step-by-step guide when we tested it.

Unfortunately, Xilinx has not yet given Plunify permission to use the compiler with an online service, so the tutorial is no longer live…

We talked to Plunify about what happened happened, and asked your questions from the forum.

A short summary of the Q&A is below. Followup questions are welcome.

Thanks to Kirvy and Harnhua for the interview. Check out Plunify for free.

Previous interviews.

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Dangerous Prototypes: About us

Dangerous Prototypes is 2 years old this month. We updated our about page with a bit of history and answers to common questions.

What do you guys do?

Dangerous Prototypes makes a new open source hardware project every month. We like to make hacking and development tools, but we make toys and obscure internet-influenced art too.

We don’t have a pick and place like SparkFun or Adafruit, we don’t stock or sell any of our projects. All our stuff is manufactured and sold by Seeed Studio in China. We get a quote for 100 and 500 of our project, order stock, and set the retail price. You can too using their Propagate service.

What is open source hardware?

Everything associated with our projects is available to reuse and remix in your own projects. Not just the files for circuit boards and source code, but also the project documentation, illustrations (and original source files), blog posts, and more. We even publish the ‘product integration’ package we use to manufacture the hardware – use it to make and sell your own.

Open development? The opensourcie-ist?

A lot of people are riding the open source wave and releasing projects under an open source license. We try to step it up a notch. 99% of our development is done online in forum public forums, our in-progress projects are documented on a public wiki, and the latest files are available for anyone to download.

Even if you live open source, there might be a knee jerk reaction to helping competitors sell your project before you finish it. First, it’s never happened. Second, we welcome it! We’re small and will never finish all the projects we start, if someone wants devote their time and expertise to complete a project for us, why would we turn that down? We’ll even send them the  PCB for free.

What’s a free PCB drawer? Why do you give away your PCBs for free?

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Mini theremin uses infrared proximity sensor

Chris writes:  It’s a theremin that uses an IR proximity sensor to detect how far away a hand is, then plays a specific music note for that distance. It works quite well, checkout the demo video in the link.

The purpose of this project is to build a simple but working theremin that can play the base notes (no sharps or flats) from one octave to another, specifically C4 to C5. The IR proximity sensor will detect how far away your hand or an object is from it and produce a specifc pitch for that distance.

The PIC’s internal Analog-to-Digital converter will be in charge of translating the IR proximity sensor feedback data which the PIC will translate into a usable distance number. A fast timer interrupt circuit will be created inside the PIC to constantly be playing the tone for the last distance detected. If nothing is within the ‘playing field’ of this IR theremin, no note should be played.

Via the contact form.

Dangerous Prototypes has never and will never show ads, period

My name is Heather and I am a Marketing Administrator for (removed). We have a client that may be interested in advertising on your site dangerousprototypes.com. Is there a good person to contact about options and rates?

There’s ads on the web?

Dangerous Prototypes has never displayed ads or participated in paid referral programs, and we won’t. Your purchases at Seeed Studio and our distributors make Dangerous Prototypes possible.

Every time a marketing troll bangs a press release through the contact form, we write back and ask for stuff to give away. We try to get as much free swag for you as possible, but we never accept payment for giveaways.

We run press releases for lots of electronic stuff, but they’re never paid. Even our favorite companies risk mocking.

Engineers sample, it’s a normal part of the industry. Occasionally we use or review a free sample, but we will never accept paid posts.  We disclose any free stuff that isn’t also available to other engineers.

Finally, what Adafruit said: we will not use intrusive privacy violating social networking features malware on the site.

We don’t begrudge ad-driven sites, but we don’t want it here.

Also, the web has ads?

New release: XILINX ISE Design Suite 13.2

Xilinx has announced the availability of their ISE Design Suite 13.2. While most of the improvements appear geared toward the 7 Series FPGA families, if you’re in need of the Xilinx software or just want to upgrade you’ll find downloads for Windows and Linux here.

As a much appreciated courtesy, Xilinx is also making DVDs available via mail.

Thermal Tweeter wins Adafruit/Instructables challenge!

Thank you for sending tweets and voting the Thermal Tweeter to first place in the Adafruit/Instructables Make It Tweet Challenge! There were so many great entries, congratulations to everyone who entered for making a great project!

A special thanks to Sjaak for the original idea, and for allowing his printer to be tortured for a few weeks by random internet commentators.

We’ll publish the USTREAM statistics in the next few days.

Don’t forget to send us a tweet @dangerousproto and watch it print live on the USTREAM feed.

Notice and screenshot via Adafruit.

Touchstone TS1001 op-amp demo board unboxing

Touchstone Semi sent a demo board for the record-breaking, low power, low voltage TS1001 op-amp. We covered their design competition earlier.

The demo board has a complete support circuit so the parts are ready to evaluate.  It’s populated with two TS1001 op-amps, in inverting and non-inverting configurations.

Attention component manufacturers: this is how to sample the latest tiny components. This little demo board is ready to connect to a test circuit. The op-amp is an SOT-23-5 SC-70 package, which anyone can hand solder with a little practice, but it is a killer way to evaluate new lead-less parts (*cough* Maxim, TI).

We’ll hook it up to the Dangerous DSO and a lab oscilloscope for a demo soon. You can also sample their op-amps, and read more about Touchstone in EETimes.

Dangerous Prototypes: Interview with HotHardware

HotHardware has an interview with Dangerous Prototypes:

Dangerous Prototypes is a two-year old organization with the stated mission of producing “one new open source project every month.” In its nearly two years in existence, DP has created about 30 projects, such as the Flash Destroyer. All are being sold by another interesting company, Seeed Studio. Seeed is a contract manufacturing/sales channel for hire. It helps hardware designers get their ideas manufactured in China and sold worldwide. Intrigued, we contacted DP’s head honcho, Ian Lesnet (who tells us his official title is Internet Troll), and picked his brain a little about his company, which is based in Muscatine, Iowa, but is really “run by loose network of paid and unpaid contributors all around the world,” he says.

Thank you HotHardware and Julie for the great writeup! We answered questions for this article over email.

Scooped on our own interview by Adafruit and Slashdot.

Partlist Wednesday: Ceramic capacitors

Every Wednesday we highlight a component from the updated partlist. This week: surface mount ceramic capacitors.

Ceramic capacitors are cheaper than aluminum and tantalum SMD caps, but come in smaller values. Typical values are in the pF to 1uF range, but we’ve noticed some 2uF+ ceramic caps at Mouser recently. Most have a maximum rating between 25 and 50volts.

Unlike electrolytic capacitors, ceramic caps are unpolarized. There’s no + or – side, they can’t go in backwards on accident.

Our favorite packages are 0805 and 0603. We recently standardized on the smaller 0603 because it can be 30-50% cheaper than 0805.

Here are some rules of thumb for ceramic capacitors:

  • Value: pF, nF, uF, F, etc. Usually taken from a schematic, partlist, or datasheet.
  • Voltage: We choose something at least double the operating voltage. A 0.1uF cap decoupling a 3.3volt power pin should be rated for at least 6.6volts.
  • Tolerance: How close to actual value is any given capacitor. Not really important unless it is an audio or analog application, and the datasheet will specify. We don’t worry about this for digital stuff.
  • ESR: How ‘fast’ is a capacitor. For most digital hobby stuff this is never important, maybe switch mode power supplies. If it is, the design probably says what to do.
  • 100nF is the same as 0.1uF. A 0.1uF ceramic capacitor is generally used on every power pin of a digital chip. Commonly called a decoupling capacitor because it lessens the effect of a digital chip on a circuit power supply.
  • 18pF, 0.1uF, and 1uF ceramic caps are most common in our projects, we buy them by the reel. Get a cheap capacitor kit from eBay so you have a couple of the other values available too.

picChess

Arthur Benemann has been working on a microcontroller chess game using a Microchip DSPIC33FJ128MC804-PT. He writes:

I would like to share my latest project, the picChess, its a Microcontroller Chess game. It has and VGA video interface, audio, Keyboard connection, and even a AI to play against the Microcontroller.

The project, including source and schematic can be found in this Instructable.

Via the contact form.

Dangerous Prototypes: Interview with EDN

EDN published the first-ever article about Dangerous Prototypes. Open-source hardware suits kitchen-table start-up:

Seeed Studio noticed an untapped need in the United States from engineers who have good ideas but lack the know-how and capital to start a production line. Seeed Studio’s first partner is Ian Lesnet, whose protocol debugger, Bus Pirate, became the first product of his new company, Dangerous Prototypes.

In a very luck break we scored this interview with Margery Conner, Technical Editor of EDN, at the Bay Area Maker Faire 2011. The interview was in-person.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with us and write about Dangerous Prototypes!

Thanks to Adafruit for covering this interview too.

Wiki now uses forum logins

You can now sign in to the documentation wiki with your forum user name and password. Anyone with a forum account can add pages, fix errors, and make updates.

For the last couple months wiki registrations have been disabled. Wiki spammers are relentless, recaptcha and bad behavior only slowed the stupidest bots. It’s a lot easier to handle spammers through the forum, especially with our home-spun forum spam hammer MOD. The non-standard configuration should also send most common scripts packing.

Thanks for your edits to the wiki. It’s a community resource and you should feel at home making changes. Soon you can get a free PCB code for contributing to the wiki. More on that soon.

A special thanks to TREV, our volunteer wiki librarian. He keeps the pages categorized, fixes text, and reorganizes pages as needed.

Python Logic Sniffer client

Mel released a new Python client for the Logic Sniffer:

Yet another client, this one written in Python 2.  It depends on wxPython, pySerial and NumPy packages. I’m developing and testing in Ubuntu Linux, but with luck it will run under Windows and OS/X as well.

Via the forum.

Get your own Logic Sniffer for $50, with free worldwide shipping.

Boldport flow: Makefiles for FPGA projects

 

saardrimer writes:

‘boldport flow’ is a web-based tool that allows you to easily generate a build environment for your FPGA projects and run them on your machine. At its current form, it’s a Makefile generator with a web-based front end (now supporting Xilinx, FPGAs, and Linux).

The “theory” behind the structure boldport uses is defined here which may be useful even if you don’t use boldport.

I’m seeking early adopters and honest feedback (that is, good and bad), which go a long way at this early stage. I’m also happy to work with projects in order for them to use the ‘boldport flow’, and allow me to improve the tool.

Via the forum.

Propeller development robot


Dino’s new project this week is a Propeller development robot:

This week I decided it was time to do a project with the Parallax Propeller chip. I’d heard all kinds of good things about this MCU and since I have all these Roomba parts laying around my shop I figured it was time to build another robot. I wanted a robot platform that I could experiment with. One that could easily have other sensors added in the future. I had a Propeller MSR1 control board on hand which is perfectly suited to this purpose with it’s 24 IO pins and on board h-bridge. I also had an extra Parallax PING sensor to mount on my robot and a couple of those wonderful Roomba drive motors to move the thing. Next I needed a chassis to mount everything to. I had a plastic enclosure leftover from the Laser Ranger Finder project that was perfect. Now that all my parts were gathered together, it was time to get building.

Via the contact form.

Free PCB coupon to RT #6 & #23 @dangerousproto

Every Tuesday we give away some extra PCBs via Twitter. This post was announced on twitter. The 6th and 23rd 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.

Watch this week’s Free PCB tweets print live on the Thermal Tweeter. We’ll mark the winners as they pop out.

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:

  • Free PCB Sunday. The classic. Every week, right here on the blog
  • Tweet-a-PCB Tuesday. Follow us and get boards in 144 characters or less
  • Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs while you wait for the weekend

You can get a Bus Blaster v2 for $34.95.

Continue reading “Free PCB coupon to RT #6 & #23 @dangerousproto”