Week in (p)review: April 08, 2011

Don’t forget to share your current project in the comments or the forum. Everyone who posts a project log this week gets a free PCB!

Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week:

Coming this week:

  • USB POV Toy firmware development commenced in full last week, and we’ll have a preview soon
  • The first batch of 7400-series logic replacements will be available for the CPLD breakout boards
  • IR Toy v2 should be in manufacturing now
  • Bus Blaster v2 is awaiting testing, we think it will be the next available project
  • App notes and datasheets all weekend
  • Free PCB Sunday
  • Status update on Monday
  • New tool post on Thursday
  • Weekly roundup and preview every Friday

What are you hacking this week?

Sparkfun IOIO Android interface

SparkFun has announced the upcoming release of their IOIO for Android Board.

The IOIO (pronounced “yo-yo”) is a board specially designed to work with your Android device (OS versions 1.5 and greater). The board provides extensive and robust connectivity to an Android device via a USB connection. The IOIO is fully controllable from within an Andriod application, using a simple and intuitive Java API – no embedded programming or external programmer will ever be needed, even for firmware upgrades! So far, the devices proven to work are: G1, Nexus One, Nexus S, Motorola Droid X.

The IOIO’s list price is $49.95

Other CPLD dev boards

Kamani Development Tools has the ZL4PLD_9572 dev board, which features an onboard voltage regulator and ISP connector. The preassembled board is designed in a 40 pin DIP breadboard compatible form, and sells for €13.36, plus €30 for shipping to EU countries.

AWC sells the PBX84 Xilinx Prototyping Board, in several different configurations beginning at $49.95 plus shipping (kit form only). The board’s format is unique, in that one bank of connections terminates in male header pins for use with a breadboard, while the other three banks are female headers.

Both of the above boards are based on the Xilinx XC9572XL chip, which is the same device featured on our XC9572XL CPLD development board, available preassembled for $15 from SeeedStudio.

TOOLS: Atten ADS1062CA oscilloscope

Our favorite tools have a new home on the wiki. Each week we’ll muse about one of them. Have your own tool review? We’ll post that too!

The Atten ADS1062CA is a dual channel digital storage oscilloscope capable of 1Gsamples a second, and an analog bandwidth of 60Mhz. An oscilloscope is a useful piece of equipment when we work on hardware. We use it to find optimal component values, watch reset pins on microcontrollers, or find the source of unwanted noise.  See Make’s take on oscilloscopes.

The ADS1062CA was much more affordable at$325US with shipping, than an equivalent used model from a better known manufacturer. It has features similar to a Rigol DS1052e, and it uses the same Analog Devices Blackfin DSP and ADCs.

We picked this scope up on eBay, and it shipped directly from China. It came with two 60Mhz 1x/10x probes, manuals, software, USB cable, and a power cord for Asian outlets.

The control panel is in English,  but the manual was only printed in Chinese. We learned the functions and settings through experimentation, and that gave the Atten a higher learning curve than expected.  When first powered on the scope went directly to the setup menu, changing the language to English was very strait forward.

The features of the ADS1062CA include: math functions add, subtract, divide, multiply, FFT, triggering rising/falling edge, video, pulse, slope, averaging, the ability to save/print a bitmap of the display with a single press of a dedicated button, XY mode, automatic measurement and portability.

The large dials have indents to give feed back when adjusting the horizontal and vertical ranges. The smaller dials have a smooth motion.  The auto setup feature is a little sluggish, but acceptable. The interface even has four themes.

A full list of specifications can be found here.

Overall this is a good scope for its price range, we get lots of use out of it.

SparkFun’s Shenzhen tour, part deux

SparkFun made a second trip to Shenzhen, China. Seeed Studio is located here, as well as some impressively massive electronics markets:

After checking out a handful of factories on the geek tour in 2009, it was time for me to return to China to visit some of the factories that make goods for SparkFun.

…half the trip was about meeting vendors, the other half was about geeking out and seeing how neat stuff is made.

We’re planning a trip this fall. Anyone else interested?

 

FPGA startups: a brief history

The FPGA manufacturing business has seen many players come and go over its brief history. Unlike the microcontroller industry, where many of the early manufacturers are still in business, the PLD arena has been whittled down to just a few of its early competitors. This article by Eric Esteve posted on SemiWiki chronicles the business cycle of various FPGA manufacturers and analyzes their successes and failures.

Advanced Arduino hacking

Maik Schmidt likes the Arduino, but like many of us he realizes the platform’s potential for advanced techniques beyond the IDE. In this article from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, he highlights the steps a beginner can take to learn how to develop software for the Arduino in a deeper way.

Starting with how the IDE turns sketches into executable code, he transitions to managing Arduino projects with a good old Makefile that you can easily integrate into your favorite IDE. In addition, he demonstrates that the Arduino platform supports nearly all features of the current C++ standard and that it’s advantageous to use these features for programming embedded systems. The message to beginners is not to abandon the Arduino as you learn advanced programming techniques, but to use that knowledge to expand Arduino’s capabilities.

STMicroelectronics MEMS pressure sensor

STMicroelectronics has announced a new silicon pressure sensor capable of providing extremely high-resolution measurements of pressure – and therefore also of altitude – in a compact, thin package. The LPS001WP is a tiny (3×5 mm) silicon pressure sensor with an embedded 16-bit ADC, SPI and I2C interfaces and a supply voltage range of 2.2 V to 3.6 V.

According to the datasheet the device has an operating pressure range of 300–1100 millibar, corresponding to the atmospheric pressures between -750 and +9000 metres relative to sea level, and can detect pressure changes as small as 0,065 millibar, corresponding to 80 cm of altitude.

The LPS001WP will be manufactured in a small plastic land grid array (HCLGA) package and is guaranteed to operate over a temperature range extending from -40 °C to +85 °C. The package is holed to allow external pressure to reach the sensing element. Potential uses include sensing altitude to detect which floor of a building a device is (or was) on.

3D printable IDC header shrouds

Renosis has created a 3D printable add-on shroud for 6 and 10 pin IDC headers.  Breakaway headers are much cheaper than shrouded headers and it would be possible to make them in other sizes if needed.

If you have access to a 3D printer this looks like a great way to add shrouds to your projects.  You could also use this trick to add a shroud to your Bus Pirate.

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

Update: Seeed Studio to help Japan

An update from an earlier post, Seeed Studio has come up with a design for their radiation detector.

Well, as always our product will be open-sourced and hackable with flexible working conditions and at a comparatively lower price. Importantly, they will be plenty of stock. And we are also thinking a distribution pattern calls “sell one, donate one”. Briefly, customers buy a Geiger counter from us, and we consequently donate one to Hackerspace or other communities in Japan.

Ideally, this will happen in the following weeks. We are going to send some samples to the Japan for further testing, and then the first 100 pieces may be available at the end of April. Thanks again for the support!

Via SeeedStudio blog

NEW PROTOTYPE: Logic Shrimp logic analyzer

The Logic Shrimp 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.

The 23K256 serial SRAM from Microchip makes this project possible. Each chip stores up to 256K samples from one logic analyzer channel. After demoing the SRAM at Hack a Day, Ian made a one channel logic probe with a single chip. The SCANALOGIC2 inspired this 4 channel version.

  • 4 channels @ 256K samples per channel
  • 5volt tolerant inputs
  • 20/12/6/3/2/1MHz capture rates, and lower
  • Simple edge change triggers on all channels, adjustable pre/post trigger samples
  • SUMP protocol compatible
  • USB interface, USB firmware upgradable
  • Open source (CC-BY-SA)

Hardware design overview

The Logic Shrimp design is diagrammed above. Four 23K256 SRAMs capture up to 256K samples on each channel. The SRAMs run at 3.3volts, but the Logic Shrimp inputs are 5volt tolerant thanks to a 74LVC573 buffer. A PIC 18F24J50 configures the SRAMs and provides a capture clock source: either from the pulse-width modulator, or from a 20MHz oscillator though a one-bit buffer.

Resources

You can get a Logic Shrimp for $34.90 only at Seeed Studio.


Logic Sniffer advanced trigger support

flubberlab is diagramming the advanced triggers in the new Logic Sniffer Demon core in hopes of adding software support in the client.

To understand the trigger system, and with an eye toward a trigger configuration user-interface (and application perhaps), I attempted to flesh-out the trigger resource and sequence illustrations shown in the OLS FPGA specification

If you’re a Java programmer this could be a challenging and interesting project.

Via the forum.

Spotify Radio project looks to put playlists on physical disks

Jordi Parra has been making progress on this prototype standalone music player that comes with RFID 8 tags that can be linked to Spotify music playlists. It can be for yourself, or to give as a present, giving you the chance to link music to the tags before giving it to that person, similar to mixtapes from “back in the day.”

At this stage the prototype must still be connected to a computer in order to play music, but Jordi’s plans are for a standalone player with its own speakers and wifi connection. He can’t run libspotify nor play music from Spotify on the Arduino, but it would be possible on an embedded Linux. The RFID tags don’t store music, but are linked to a certain Spotify URI or search. Each tag has a unique ID, and each unique ID points to Spotify music. His goal is to keep the project as inexpensive as possible, hopefully in the $50 range. This project is still in the development stage, and Jordi will appreciate any suggestions or assistance.

Via Wired.