OHS 2011 project demo proposal: Thermal Tweeter

Today is the deadline for Open Hardware Summit 2011 talk, breakout, and project demo proposals. We’re publishing ours for feedback, and maybe to inspire your last minute entry.

OHS has an evening happy hour with a project show and tell.  We thought the Thermal Tweeter, packed into an open source 3d-printed stand, would be a simple interactive demo that doesn’t take a lot of space. The code would be updated to search for OHS keywords and print the latest Tweets about the conference.

The proposal follows the format given at the MakerBot link above:

Bio:  Ian builds a new open hardware project every month at
DangerousPrototypes.com.  Copies of the projects are available from Seeed
Studio’s open hardware manufacturing service.

Description of demo:  Tweets that mention an Open Hardware Summit tag are printed on a small thermal printer. This is an existing demo that works well. The pictures show the current setup, but it will be mounted in an open source 3d-printed case for the demo.

The project does require an internet connection, but we’ve got that covered. We will tether it to a smartphone’s WIFI.

Importance:  It’s fun, interactive, and open source. Participants with smartphones can tweet and see it print. Lurkers at home can reach into the summit too.

Requirements: 12-18″ of table space, power. The project does require an internet connection, but we’ve got that covered. We will tether it to a smartphone’s 3G data service.

OHS 2011 breakout proposal: Open hardware for the (not so) masses

Today is the deadline for Open Hardware Summit 2011 talk, breakout, and demo proposals. We’re publishing ours for feedback, and maybe to inspire your last minute entry.

A last minute proposal to discuss the practical aspects of low-volume (20-500units) open hardware manufacturing. Who is doing it, what are the arrangements, what is the process like.

Please shout if you’d like to be involved, or know any other small volume hardware people who might like to be on a panel.

The proposal follows the format given at the MakerBot link above:

Type of submission: breakout session

Title: Getting your stuff made: open hardware for the (not so) masses

Bio: Ian builds a new open hardware project every month at DangerousPrototypes.com. Copies of the projects are available from Seeed Studio’s open hardware manufacturing service.

Importance: If the open hardware community is going to grow and thrive, talented people who don’t etch PCBs or solder surface mount parts need a way to get hardware. At the same time, many hackers don’t want to go into the manufacturing and mail order business. Manufacturing a project is a must. It’s the only way to put it in the hands of firmware, software, and documentation developers who make a sizable and unique contribution to open hardware when given the opportunity.

Description of breakout: One the most common questions we get is how to go from prototype to manufactured project. The goal of this breakout session is to share experience with micro-volume (20-500unit) open hardware manufacturing.

First a review of how open hardware is being produced right now with a few notable examples: contract manufacturing, licensing, DIY assembly, and full outsourcing. We’ll look at a package of materials used to manufacture a project, and discuss best practices for handling the unique problems of super small-scale hardware production. (Hopefully) several perspectives will be included, from full outsourcing to the garage assembly line.

Dangerous Prototypes – All manufacturing and sales handled by Seeed Studio.

Gadget Factory – Experienced with contract manufacturing, and DIY assembly lines.

???????? – your suggestions, or whomever else we can rustle up :)

The program will end with Q&A, and breakout group discussion of barriers to getting a small open hardware project manufactured. What you hacking? Would you ever want to manufacture it?

Breaking copy protection in MCUs: then and now

When you decide to copy protect the firmware on your MCU, how effective are efforts such as setting a lock bit or enabling chip erase modes?

Sergei P. Skorobogatov’s article provides an overview of the methods he’s tried against MCUs from various manufacturers. He outlines both invasive and non-invasive techniques such as chip depackaging, microprobing and fault generation.

This document is somewhat historical in nature, covering techniques developed between 1996-2000. Nevertheless it is regarded as one of the foundational works on this aspect of hardware hacking.

Sergei has updated this information with his PhD thesis from 2004.

Week in (p)review: June 24, 2011

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:

Server configuration pushed everything back another week, but we’re in the hands of professionals now. Response time is down to an amazing 500ms, and lots of people are reporting faster load times. The OHS 2011 proposals are out today, and it’s smooth sailing from here:

  • The final word on our site outage, and why we’re off the cloud
  • LeafLabs Maple conference call, delayed twice again due to site outage
  • 100% open source PIC USB stack is crazy stable. JTR is already updating the IR Toy to make use of the new features
  • We’re trying setup a conference call with Plunify this week
  • Free PCB Sunday
  • Free PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday
  • Free PCBs via Facebook on Friday
  • Weekly roundup and preview every Friday

What are you hacking this week?

OHS 2011 talk proposal: Open Hardware and the $2000 USB tax

Today is the deadline for Open Hardware Summit 2011 talk, breakout, and demo proposals. We’re publishing ours for feedback, and maybe to inspire your last minute entry.

This is for a 5-20 minute talk to the entire group about USB IDs, and all the hoops you have to jump through to work with them. There’s no way it’ll be selected given the headliners available, but given the ridiculousness of the USB ID situation it might be a humorous break from heavier topics. This was inspired by a discussion with Bert Vermeulen prior to OHS 2010.

If anyone wants to partner up and do a breakout group on this, that would be cool too!

The proposal follows the format given at the MakerBot link above:

Type of submission:  talk or breakout session. A 5-20 minute talk is no problem, but maybe this is specific enough that it should be a breakout. I’m flexible and can talk a little or a lot, general or specific. I’d also be thrilled to team up with anyone who wants to do a breakout on this topic.

Title: Open Hardware and the $2000 USB tax

Bio: Ian builds a new open hardware project every month at DangerousPrototypes.com, many of them use USB. Copies of the projects are available from Seeed Studio’s open hardware manufacturing service.

Description of talk: Every USB device needs a unique ID number issued by the USB forum. A block of 65,000 numbers is available for $2000. That’s a hefty investment for a small open hardware community or kitchen table start up.

The ID also comes with a ton of restrictions that don’t jive with open source, namely it can’t be shared and used freely under an open source license. Projects may have open source code, but a compiled firmware with a USB ID can’t be used freely. For example, the ATMEGA USB to serial converter chip on the new Arduino requires a USB ID. Anyone who wants to manufacture an UNO clone has to cough up $2000 bucks to get their own ID, Arduino can’t share theirs. That’s the $2000 USB tax.

Current options:

  • Resell them: Everyone’s first thought, but let’s talk about the Dutch guys who tried…
  • Sub license one: Microchip, FTDI, and other USB hardware makers are allowed to sub license USB IDs to use with their hardware. This is how we do USB projects. The number can’t be shared (not open source friendly), and may have a limit like 10,000 units.
  • Squat a range: USB forum can’t recycle a number once it is assigned. Open hardware can squat an abandoned or revoked (eg, the Dutch guys’) number. There’s no law to prevent it (*probably) and it’s unlikely to duplicate an existing device. Fine for testing but not very professional, and the USB forum may still send nasty-grams if you sell it.

Potential solutions:

  • Relax resale policy:  This would be ideal, but they’re getting more strict and there’s still the licensing and sharing problem.
  • Testing block:  There’s no block of IDs for internal testing. A free-for-all range would be great, with some reserved IDs for common services like USB to serial. No restrictions on this range, but no guarantee devices won’t conflict.
  • Open block:  A block of IDs available to open hardware projects. It’s probably not worth the USB forum’s time to sell individual numbers, but even if they’re adverse to resale maybe they would allow a non-profit to issue numbers for qualified OSH licensed projects. The key is that open source project be able to share these numbers so we don’t have to dance around proper open source distribution.

Conclusions:
The situation is silly, but it could easily be solved with a policy change at the USB forum. That probably means lobbying the big players like Intel who make up the USB forum and requesting a space for open hardware. Open hardware is visible and trendy right now, it’s probably a great time to entice and shame key players into acknowledging our needs.

Importance: USB is already the standard interface on most computers, and many open hardware projects use it too. As open hardware becomes more wide spread the issues of USB IDs will become bigger. A big company doesn’t blink at $2000 for an ID, but it locks out small makers and open source communities.

Radio Shack listened: kits now in stock

Radio Shack is now selling educational electronics kits. Walk in in to your nearest store and you will find  about 20 kits ranging small (transistor)blinky to a USB Experiment Interface Board with a Microchip pic18. the kits are manufactured by Velleman, and come with all through-hole components, so a beginner can solder together a kit in no time.

Seeed Studio 3rd anniversary sale

Seeed Studio is having a happy hour sale for their 3-Year anniversary:

Seeedstudio turns 3 years old next month, and because this is such a special event we’ve decide to launch our “Happy Hour” to celebrate with all our fans out there. What this means is that for couple hours every day from July 6th to July 8th, some of our featured products will be discounted at up to 50%! Yes, it’s our birthday but we’re ready to offer you presents!

There will be some discounts from us too on Bus Pirates, CPLD dev-boards, and protoboards.

Thermal Tweeter update: Bug fixes

After a few late night mods the Thermal Tweeter is super responsive. We swapped it over to the authenticated feed instead of the public search. Send us a tweet @dangerousproto and you should see it on the live stream within 60 seconds.

Here’s some tasty development morsels:

  1. There’s a 36 second USTREAM delay between the tweet printing and the video in our browser.
  2. There’s some delay in Twitter’s public search API. Tons of @mentions showed up in Tweetdeck, but only a trickle showed up in the public search used by the printer. It could be a search cache, spam prevention, system architecture, lazy gnomes, who knows. It works fine if there are only a few mentions, but when there are a lot Twitter seems to get selective about who to include.
  3. Last night we implemented a cheat to access the authenticated feed. There wasn’t time to implement proper oAuth access on the web platform, so we used a small PHP script to authenticate with Twitter and pass the @mentions feed in a format we can deal with.
  4. The @mentions JSON feed is formatted differently than the public search results. For example there are several different ID tags that confuse our brain-dead parser. With no time to implement a proper JSON parser, we used a PHP library to decode the feed and then only include the tags we need. This led to some interesting character encoding problems – thanks to @bertjwregeer for helping us work them out.

In our opinion the current setup is cheating. The goal is to integrate with the actual Twitter API, a stand-alone Twitter appliance, but we’re using a second server to authenticate and pre-process the data.

The original setup works fine for a moderate number of @mentions.  However when there are a lot @mentions, Twitter seems to get choosy and that doesn’t make for a very satisfying interactive internet art experience.

The pile of Tweets after the first 24 hours.

Free PCBs via RT @dangerousproto check details

Free video chat by Ustream

4000 people viewed the Thermal Tweeter on USTREAM since it went online yesterday, but there’s only a few meters of Tweets. There’s also some new tweets that don’t show up in a public search (privacy settings?).

Help us make it rain, for the sake of debugging of course, and get a free PCB code. We’ll send a code to the 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, 60th, 70th, 80th, 90th, and 100th Tweeter to scroll through the Thermal Tweeter during the live feed. That’s a free PCB code to every 10th tweeter of the next 100.

Not sure why your tweet didn’t print? Check the public Twitter search for @dangerousproto to see if it showed up. If not, is there anything like a privacy setting that causes this? We’re not sure why Thermal Tweeter misses some tweets that we see when logged in. Continue reading “Free PCBs via RT @dangerousproto check details”

LIN: Local Interconnect Network comms

The Local Interconnect Network (LIN) is a single-wire, low cost, serial communications system which is a subbus of CAN used primarily in automotive systems. In this video Microchip provides an overview of LIN and some of their related products and tools.

For more info on the specifics of the LIN protocol, see this tutorial from National Instruments.

The Verbalizer: open source dev board for Google’s voice search

BreakfastNY has posted details on how to build The Verbalizer: your own open source Arduino based microphone dev board for use with Google’s Voice Search for Desktop.

They write:

With Google announcing the launch of Voice Search for desktop, we couldn’t help thinking that there was even more fun to be had with talking to a computer. So, we went ahead and built an open source dev board to inspire people to build their own useful and wacky contraptions to take Voice Search to another level.

Check out their site for code downloads (Mac OSX and associated Arduino sketch) and full details.

Fill out their request form and you may be selected to get a free Verbalizer of your own!

Bus Pirate v3.5 now shipping

Seeed Studio posted a picture of the new Bus Pirate v3.5 hardware. Updated hardware will ship in all future orders.

Bus Pirate v3.5 has exactly the same features as Bus Pirate v3b. We added a much requested shrouded header, and made tweaks to keep manufacturing costs down. We haven’t quite finished the hardware writeup, but here’s a quick summary of changes:

  1. v3.5 has a bigger PCB, the same size as v4. Both boards will fit the same inexpensive acrylic case.
  2. The IO header is centered and has a shroud – the plastic cover thing that makes it easy to get the probe cable on right (not pictured because we couldn’t find one)
  3. Most resistors were consolidated into resistor packs. The arrays are cheaper, and there’s three fewer pick and place movements for each array, nine less to assemble v3.5.
  4. All parts reduced to 0603, CD4066 (IC3) changed to SSOP.
  5. Test pins shorted to indicate v3.5. The firmware knows if it runs on a v2.5/3a,v3b, or v3.5 PCB. Not that it matters at all.

The first batch of 500 Bus Pirate v3.5s is extra special. Seeed has 500 SOIC PIC 24Fj64GA002s sitting around so we made the first board with an SOIC footprint.

Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.

USB color changer free PCB build

znanev built a free RGB color changer PCB. This was the ‘first’ free PCB. It was originally a DIY Life project. Someone had a bunch of the boards made (a TON!) and mailed us a brick of them. They were free PCB filler boards many times during our first year.

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 another coupon code for the free PCB drawer.

Box of new PCBs

A box of PCBs just arrived from Seeed Studio’s Fusion PCB service. This batch includes:

All of these PCBs have been added to the free PCB store. Enjoy!

PROTOTYPE: Thermal Tweeter, networked Twitter printer @dangerousproto

Free video chat by Ustream

Send a Tweet to @dangerousproto and watch it print live on the USTREAM feed.

Thermal Tweeter is hacked together from a SparkFun thermal printer and the web platform internet development board. No computers are used to query twitter or run the printer, this is a 100% stand-alone Twitter appliance.

This is a soft-launch of our project for the Adafruit/Instructables Make it Tweet Challenge. We need your help stress testing the system today.

Keep reading to find out how it works.

Continue reading “PROTOTYPE: Thermal Tweeter, networked Twitter printer @dangerousproto”

Wireless networked AT keyboard

Creative technology student Pieter Pelt and Hybrid Worlds present this project detailing how to connect an old AT style computer keyboard to a PC via Arduino and Xbee modules and using the Teensy PS2Keyboard library.

Using Xbee allows for keyboards which are not only wireless, but also networked so that several keyboards can be meshed together and routed to one PC. Now that could make a collaborative coding project interesting!

All code can be found on the Hybrid Worlds project page at bottom of page (top of page refers to a different wireless chip, the nRF24L01.)

STM8S-Discovery hardware module provides DALI interface

The Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI) standard is a communication protocol widely used in intelligent lighting applications. Its use is not limited to fluorescent tube lamp dimmable ballasts, for which it was initially designed, but also for future LED applications.

This STEVAL-ILM001V1 hardware module by STMicroelectronics plugs into the STM8S Discovery board allowing you to create a fully working DALI slave application. The STM8S-DISCOVERY + STEVAL-ILM001V1 work as a DALI slave device and can be connected to and controlled by any DALI network.

You can download the data brief for more info. It also contains the schematic, which reveals that this board could be homebrewed for a lot less than the $61.10 list price. (Samples are not available.)

Details on the DALI standard can be found in this 64 page official manual. Also see the STM8 DALI Slave Library app note.