Take a look at Seeed Studio’s new pick and place machine. It looks like the board being stuffed is a Bus Pirate v3. Video here.
Via the forum.
Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors Adafruit, Open Source Control Systems, and eHaJo.
Daedalus used the PIC18F2550 on the USB IR Toy to jailbreak his Play Station 3 (original article , machine translation). He programmed the IR Toy with PL3GrooPIC, a port of the PSGroove jailbreak utility that runs on PIC microcontroller. PL3GrooPIC firmware works with the Diolan bootloader in the USB IR Toy, no changes required.
We always like to hear how you repurpose your projects. If you’ve documented an interesting hack drop as a line on the contact form.
Get the USB IR Toy for $20, including worldwide shipping.
There is an intermittent issue with the comments. Some users are seeing other user details in the comment box. We tried a full reinstall, disabling plugins, flushing the cache, etc, but the issue persists.
We posted a support query in the WordPress forum, and have been hanging out in the IRC channel. No solutions so far.This appears to be a very rare, but old, WordPress issue dating to at least 2.3.3 (currently 3.0.4).
To protect everyone’s privacy, we edited the comments source to force the email field to be blank. Other usernames and websites may still pop up, but email addresses are protected.
We’ll continue to persue support at WordPress, and also ask our ISP if it could be a sessions issue.
This dice by Rickard Gunee is interesting because it uses one of the smallest microcontrollers, a 6-pin PIC10F200. With 4 GPIO it’s just one pin more than the voltage regulator. Using multiplexing it controls 4 strings of LEDs and even one input button. The whole project is open source and also available as kit.
An experimental Bus Pirate v4 prototype is now available for $50 at Seeed Studio. This batch of Bus Pirate v4 is intended only for developers and accessory designers. It comes on a green PCB to signify that it’s not ready for general use.
It ships without a firmware, you must have a PIC programmer to use Bus Pirate v4.
The initial price is set very high to discourage non-developers. Active developers will receive a 50%-100% refund from Dangerous Prototypes.
Seeed is listing half of the developer boards. If they run out and you need one, we’ll dip into the reserve boards.
If no major flaws are discovered in the v4 design, it can go into mass production when we have a working bootloader for USB firmware upgrades. Unfortunately this hasn’t even been started, but we hope to make some progress next week.
Read about the Bus Pirate v4 design on the wiki and join the development effort in the forum.
GTV Hacker has developed a guide to installing applications and rooting your Logitech Revue. The new hack uses the Revue’s UART1 port to upload a start-up script which allows “root” access, allowing the installation of your own apps and access the full filesystem. You need to solder a set of leads to the mainboard and then connect to the box using a terminal program.
Did you ever wonder what an obscure schematic symbol represents?
Electrical What?! is a site that answers this question and more. It’s an intuitive, easily accessible, free and open library of symbols searchable by name or shape and attributes.
When Jack the Vendicator’s laptop display malfunctioned, he thought all was lost. He developed a rescue strategy using an Arduino as a USB bridge between the laptop and a desktop PC. He plugged the Arduino into the laptop, and connected a USB serial converter from his desktop computer to the Arduino’s serial pins. In effect he using the FTDI chip as a null modem cable , translating those signals back into USB on either end. Once he booted the headless laptop it took just a couple of blindly typed commands to get SSH running in order to regain control.
We recently did a little demo to send data to an Arduino with a TCP/IP Shield (using ATC-1000M) from an Android device via Wifi.
The Android phone in this demo uses Android Scripting Environment (ASE). It is available on Android Market for free.
Videos and source code after the break.
We’ve just completed verification of the Bus Blaster v2 JTAG debugger. V2 is much more flexible than v1, and uses a programmable logic chip (CPLD) for the buffer. The logic chips in v1 were expensive to source and place, but v2 uses a $1 CPLD with a bunch less pins to solder and inspect. Bus Blaster v1 will be available soon in limited production, then we’ll switch to v2.
The CPLD can be programmed to resemble just about any existing FT2232-based JTAG debugger. Proprietary software needs some funky connection to a JTAG device? No problem, just implement it in the CPLD.
Our first CPLD implementation is a clone of the Amontec JTAGkey. This is a common debugger that’s copied in a lot of projects, like OpenMoko. Eventually we’d like to have a full library of different interface clones that can be used with Bus Blaster v2.
We used Bus Blaster v1 to program the Bus Blaster v2 CPLD, though the goal is to make v2 self-programming. The CPLD is connected to the secondary JTAG interface on the FT2232 so it can be done, in theory. The problem is that our loader software doesn’t support the B interface yet. Robots and Tornado are currently looking into it.
We’re going to start the Bus Blaster v2 production process. We hope to have the ability to upgrade the CPLD without an external programmer before launch, but if not that’s ok. The current interface is sufficient for most uses, and it clones the Bus Blaster v1 connections. The great thing about open source is that anyone can contribute these features later, we don’t have to have a complete project from the beginning.
Harald Welte and Steve Markgraf presented at 27C3 CCC in Berlin, Germany, on the OsmocomBB project, a Free Software implementation of the GSM protocol stack running on a mobile phone. This provides the security researcher a tool equivalent to an Ethernet card in the TCP/IP protocol world: a simple transceiver that will send arbitrary protocol messages to a GSM network. Slides of the project are available for download.
MichaelZ tipped us to BatchPCB:
SparkFun BatchPCB Marketplace has some interesting boards for sale. Most of them are undocumented but some have some sort link to more info.
Thanks McZ! Via the forum.
Harald Welte presented at the 27C3 CCC in Berlin, Germany, demonstrating his efforts at reverse engineering the data format of a real-world RFID based debit card system. His efforts focused on the EasyCard system, which is a popular method of cashless payment in Asia. Slides of the presentation are also available.
Nimbits is a free, social and open source data logging system. It provides a mechanism for recording time series data, such as a changing temperature or stock price, into a data channel called a “Data Point”. Your data is stored on a global cloud computing infrastructure that provides remarkable uptime and scalability. You can download and install a Nimbits Server on Google App Engine, or use the Nimbits public server. Other features include accepting data input from the Parallax STAMP or the Arduino, and data output using QR Barcodes.
Joe Grand of Grand Idea Studio presents the backstory to his design of the Defcon 18 conference badge. (Joe’s talk actually begins at 09:05.)
The badge is based around a Freescale MC56F8006 16-bit digital signal controller and a Kent Displays 128-by-32 pixel reflective cholesteric liquid crystal display (ChLCD). Other functionality includes USB connectivity, seamless power switching, and hidden modes for a variety of contests held at the conference. Source code was developed using CodeWarrior for 56800/E Digital Signal Controllers. A single CR2032 3V Lithium coin cell battery provides the required power.
Joe has graciously posted the schematic, BOM, and all the tech docs related to this presentation.
Here’s a new release version of Eagle3D:
There is a new release version of Eagle3D available. As development is now done on BerliOS the files are available there.
With this release it is now possible to call POVRay directly from Eagle3D. This simplifies the creation of 3D images a lot as you do not have to fiddle around with POVRay.
Via the contact form. Thanks Matthias!
TI has a promotion giving away a limited number of the MSP430 USB Development Stick. The eZ430-F2013 is a powerful development tool that provides both the USB based programmer and F2013 development board in a small USB stick package. The flash memory can be erased and programmed in seconds with only a few keystrokes, and since the MSP430 flash is extremely low power, no external power supply is required. The tool has an integrated software environment and connects directly to the USB port of a PC which greatly simplifies the set-up and use of the tool. The flash development tool supports development with the MSP430F20xx devices.
You can order up to 3 devices and use Code EZFREE2013 on the final checkout page. Good Luck!
New to MSP430? Learn the basics on our MSP430 overview page.
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 PCBs for our new FT2232H breakout board. This board has the latest 5th generation FT2232H USB 2.0 I/O chip. The FT2232 is a USB to serial converter like the FT232, but with a bunch more features.
Get the FT2232H breakout board for $27 at Seeed Studio, read about the design on the wiki.
What if you got a game console for Christmas but don’t like playing games? You hack it to make it run your own code of course! This talk presented by bushing at the recent Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, Germany, talks about the various hacks that you can use to gain control of your hardware and make it do what you want it to do.
