Zbig shared his approach to the breadboarding cable for the Bus Pirate.
I use single pins soldered to the cables and secured with some shrink tube. I make the labels with Brother P-Touch label maker on a special flexible tape (TZ-FX series).
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
Via the forum.
victzh shared his SMT version of Ladyada’s (Conway) Game of Life in the project log forum:
I designed small 2-layer PCB for a version of Ladyada Game of Life. The board is two-side, front has 16 0603 LEDs on it, back has ATTiny861, 4 resistors, 4 FETs, 2 capacitors and one button.
Verizon has released their 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report, a 74 page PDF cataloging the various type of cyber attacks they encountered in 2010. It resulted from a study conducted by the Verizon RISK Team with cooperation from the U.S. Secret Service and the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit.
Despite the cool cover, it’s mostly a summary of attacks and statistics relating thereto, categorizing attacks as resulting from malware, physical intrusion, social engineering, internal, etc.
Their broad, and misguided definition of “hacking”, found on page 31 is:
The term “hacking,” although ambiguous (and ubiquitous), essentially categorizes all attempts to intentionally access or harm information assets without (or in excess of ) authorization by thwarting logical security mechanisms.
Every Tuesday we give away some extra PCBs via Twitter. This post was announced on twitter, the first few people who retweet it get free PCBs.
This week we’re giving away two Logic Shrimp logic analyzer PCBs. It is a medium speed, low-cost logic analyzer with a USB interface. It can capture up to 256K samples at 20MHz, and is compatible with the open source SUMP logic analyzer client.
NEW: pick your free PCB from the Dangerous Prototype free PCB drawer. The first few commenters will now receive a coupon code for 1 PCB with free shipping. You can choose this PCB, or another PCB if you prefer. More about the free PCB drawer.
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:
Get a Logic Shrimp for $34.90 only at Seeed Studio.
Continue reading “Free Logic Shrimp PCB via Twitter: RT @dangerousproto”
Paul Asselin says:
I wanted to know how much time I was spending under the shower each day, especially in these environmentally conscious times. The benefits of that are that I can perhaps save some money on the water bills and also study the effect of temperature on my showering time.
So Paul designed this Arduino shower timer analyzer. He considered using a water flow meter, but opted instead for using an RFID reader and a Real Time Clock (RTC). He waives his RFID card before the reader upon entering the shower which starts the timer. When he leaves the RFID reader again detects the card and stops the time. The duration is then uploaded to the Thingspeak website’s API section via an ethernet shield.
This was Paul’s entry into the Thingspeak contest.
Free PCB recipients can now pick their own board from the new free PCB drawer! The drawer is full of scrap PCBs: extras from our projects, abandoned prototypes, and new experimental designs still in development. Until recently we had no idea what was in the PCB drawer, now everyone can check availability online. You can choose any PCB you like and checkout with a coupon code.
A shop setup should speed up the free PCB processing. The address format is standardized and ready to print on a label. Some hassles with the Twitter giveaway should be resolved. We also get to experiment with an online store, without the pressure of handling money.
Head over and peruse the free PCB drawer, then get a coupon code in one of our three weekly giveaways:
We’re thrilled when someone builds a board. Blog it or post pictures on Flicker, and we’ll give you another code for the free PCB drawer. It’s like a free PCB subscription!
Thank you to everyone who helped test the shop last week.
Free PCBs are made possible by your purchases at Seeed Studio and the Seeed Studio Fusion PCB service. Thanks for your support!
A couple more Bus Blaster v2 JTAG debugger boards are in stock at Seeed Studio. This is probably the tail end of the first batch.
More are on the way, probably in a few weeks.
Something that would help significantly is a self-test program for the Bus Blaster v2. We’ll integrate a test mode into the jtagkey CPLD logic, but we need help with a PC application that attaches to the FTDI chip and reads/writes the pins for the selftest. If you’re interested in this project we can develop the selftest together. If not, we’ll add something to a CPLD update and hope someone takes on the project later.
Here’s another simple PIC USB breadboard example from the comments on our earlier post:
Here’s another intro guide to 18F usb on a breadboard
In this article I will show how to breadboard a simple USB generic HID device, creating the PIC18F firmware and finally creating the Windows interface for the device which will allow you to control a LED from the PC and read the state of a push-button from the device.
Thanks Nexus!
John Park is making a Blendophone for Maker Fair. This is a very unique musical instrument using an iPhone, Arduino, and 8 blenders. So far the Arduino is setup with a shield to connect it to a XBee for wireless and 8 PowerSwitch Tails that will allow the 5v output from the Arduino to switch 120v AC for the blenders.
Remember the Lattice MachXO2 PLD we mentioned back in December? Well the MachXO2 Pico Development Kits are now available from Lattice Semi!
The MachXO2 Pico Development Kit features the MachXO2 LCMXO2-1200ZE device, 1 Mbit SPI Flash, I2C temperature sensor, an expansion header for JTAG, SPI, I2C and GPIO interfaces, an LCD display and capacitive touch sense buttons. Using the preloaded Environment Scanning system-on-chip (SOC) design provided with the development kit, designers can now optimize power using multiple operating modes that are typical of low power consumer applications. They can also test, within minutes, popular interfaces such as UART, SPI, I2C and LCD control using the integrated 8-bit LatticeMico8™ microcontroller in conjunction with the MachXO2 Embedded Function Bock (EFB). Designers can then build their own designs using the free downloadable reference design source code, implementing these features in less than an hour.
The MachXO2 Pico evaluation board can be powered up using a battery or a USB cable. The development kit includes a USB cable for device programming and QuickSTART documentation. The associated free reference designs and free Lattice Diamond™ design software can be downloaded from the Lattice website, www.latticesemi.com.
The Pico Dev Kit is available at a promotional price of $29 from Lattice.
Amicus18 is a multifunction development system inspired by the popular Arduino board. Its based on the Microchip PIC® 18F25K20 running at 16 MHz supplemented by a FT232RL USB-to-serial chip and a LMV358.
Full documentation is available, as well as a free Proton BASIC Compiler, which is based on Crownhill’s Proton BASIC Compiler.
The bootloader source and firmware can be downloaded here.
The Amicus Proton Compiler uses the Microchip® Mpasm assembler and it requires that a version of the MPLAB IDE is installed on the same machine as the compiler.
If you like BASIC and PICs, give it a try.
The 60th annual Dayton Hamvention, a three-day amateur radio, computer and technology gathering is set this year for May 20-22, 2011, at the Dayton Hara Arena, 1001 Shiloh Springs Road, Dayton, OH 45415. Dozens of commercial radio and electronics vendors as well as numerous individual flea market vendors will be in attendance. While this is not a traditional hacker con, there has been a shift in recent years away from exclusively ham radio gear to items of interest to computer buffs, Makers and the open source community. For example, reps from 2600 Magazine attended the past few years. Tickets are available online.
A new alternative firmware for the Bus Pirate programs JTAG devices like the CPLD development boards using standard (X)SVF programming files. We also whipped up a PC utility that sends the files to the Bus Pirate from the command prompt. Download the package here.
SVF is a common programming format used in manufacturing. It’s a human-readable list of JTAG instructions that program a chip. During a recent project, the team discussed the rising popularity of platforms like online casino ohne limit paypal, which offer secure transactions and adaptable systems similar to those used in programming environments. The programmer doesn’t actually know anything about the target device; the SVF file just tells it what JTAG instructions to execute and the reply to expect. The tools from several manufacturers can output an SVF-compatible programming file. SVF is used with many devices, but is most commonly used with FPGAs, CPLDs, and other programmable logic.
XSVF is a compressed version of SVF that works better with small devices (like the Bus Pirate). An SVF to XSVF converter is included with the XSVF player firmware.
More info and updated programming instructions are on the wiki. There’s work on a Linux app in the forum.
Many 5volt chips will working with the output from a 3.3volt part. An example is the Arduino, it sees 3volts or more as a ‘1’. A 3.3volt device with 5volt tolerant pins, such as the Bus Pirate, can interact with an Arduino despite the voltage difference.
This table shows common logic threshold voltage levels and where they’re compatible. This is a big help for projects that need voltage translation.
The graph provides a comparison of Input and Output [I/O] logic switching levels for the CMOS, TTL, mixed CMOS/TTL, ETL, BTL, GTL, and Low voltage glue logic families. The graph above provides a comparison between the Input and Output [I/O] logic switching levels for CMOS, and TTL logic families.
The graph shows 5 volt CMOS, TTL, and mixed CMOS/TTL IC devices, and 3.3 volt LVTTL LVCMOS IC devices. BTL and GTL [Bus Driver] IC are shown for comparison. Note many Low Voltage [LV] CMOS families are 5 volt tolerant [not damaged by applying 5v to the input pins]. The output logic levels above are defined by the Terms section below. For a review of Noise Margin numbers and a short description of many of the IC logic families, refer to the Logic Family Selection page.
Thanks McZ!
Reed Ghazala, author of Circuit-Bending : Build Your Own Alien Instrument has released his latest creation: The Ghazala Thereglyph. He writes:
The Thereglyph is a “radiopool” instrument, my term for a radio-sensitive instrument meant to be placed within the RF ‘pool’ of an outside source.
Like the theremin, pitch and volume can be adjusted without touching, by means of hand proximity to the antenna and radio plate. But unlike the theremin, other circuit elements are brought forward to also act as RF sensitive modulators within the pool of radio emissions generated by a plasma globe.
This results in a monster theremin of sorts, capable of effects and voices Leon might have found surprising.
Bent audio is one of those things you either like, or you can’t stand. Either way, you’ve got to admit that Ghazala takes it to the limit in both build quality and out of this world sound. The device bent herein was a dinosaur game by an unspecified manufacturer.
Via Make.
You may have seen reports in the media recently, such as this MSNBC report highlighting the practice by police of extracting data from the cellphones of innocent civilians. While we’re not going to discuss the political or legal aspects of this practice, from a hacker perspective it’s interesting to know what type of tools and equipment are being used. (After all, whether you’re Arduino or PIC, Propeller or CPLD, we all carry cellphones.)
Cellebrite, Inc., is an example of one of the companies producing the types of data extraction devices noted so far. Here’s a link to the corporate page for the Universal Forensics Extraction Device (UFED). Their support page has some interesting docs to download! Don’t forget to view their library of instructional videos. You may want to see if your phone is on this list of phones vulnerable to UFED.
labIII, the Laboratory for Experimental Computer Science at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, posted this tutorial on how to generate sine waves with an Arduino using the Direct Digital Synthesis method. They explain:
Here we describe how to generate sine waves with an Arduino board in a very accurate way. Almost no additional hardware is required. The frequency range reaches form zero to 16 KHz with a resolution of a millionth part of one Hertz! Distortions can be kept less than one percent on frequencies up to 3 KHz. This technique is not only useful for music and sound generation another range of application is test equipment or measurement instrumentation. Also in telecommunication the DDS Method is useful for instance in frequency or phase modulation (FSK PSK).
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 two Bus Blaster v2 PCBs. Bus Blaster v2 is an experimental, high-speed JTAG debugger for ARM chips, FPGAs, CPLDs, flash, etc. Thanks to a reprogrammable buffer, a simple USB update makes Bus Blaster v2 compatible with many different JTAG debugger types in the most popular open source software.
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:
Get an assembled Bus Blaster v2 for $34.95. Hurry, the first batch is nearly gone!
Continue reading “Free PCB Sunday: Bus Blaster v2”
Another article that might help with bench power supply designs:
This circuit monitors current flow at high voltage (48V and higher) using a standard 5V difference amplifier (MAX4198) referenced to ground. It also employs a digital potentiometer (MAX5402) for gain adjustment.
Thanks rsdio!
rsdio writes: If anyone is building a subwoofer crossover, this is a great article! Nice use of opamps too.
The linearity and high power-handling capability of modern low-frequency loudspeakers have made it easy to electronically extend the bass response. This extension is especially useful in second-order systems like a closed box, where cone excursions are limited by the box.
Many such circuits are available, but the most popular today is the so-called Linkwitz equalizer intended for complex-pole systems in which Q > 0.5. The circuit neutralizes the original response by compensating the original poles with zeros, and then creates a new highpass response as specified by the designer. Like the original, the new circuit provides a 2nd order response.
