Props to Open Source Control Systems

Tec has great things to say about Open Source Control Systems, one of our newest distributors:

I got my BusPirate from Seeed and it’s great, but when I went to use it I realized I was short both grabbers and nifty colored cable to make the probes, so I went to order one online.  The Seeed guys rock, but since Open Source Control Systems were in apparently, FL (it’s hard to tell from their site) I decided to give it a shot.  It’s just a cable, and shipping from Mars takes a bit, so I was hoping to speed things up and took a chance.

So just for the record, holy crap! They got it here so fast (props to the USPS too) I didn’t know what the package was!  :-O   When I opened it it was like, “wtf? They couldn’t possibly have shipped it already?”

They moved so fast it’s unreasonable, and certainly unsustainable.  But wanted to give them a shout for rocking that hard.

Thanks Tec!

Get your own handy Bus Pirate from our friendly distributor Open Source Control Systems. Every purchase helps support this open source project.

USB IR Toy record and playback application

Check out the beta version of a new app to record and retransmit infrared remote control signals with the USB IR Toy. Direct download here.

Features:

The USB IR Toy is $20, including worldwide shipping. Every sale supports this open source project.

Open source Arduino shield outline in gEDA

Eric writes:

I’ve released an Arduino shield board outline in gEDA format under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. These files can be used as a starting place for creating Arduino shield boards.

Video overlay shield shown.

Don’t forget there is also an Arduino shield outline in the Dangerous Prototypes Eagle parts library (CC-0).

Via the tip line.

Test a Bus Pirate firmware compiled with MPLAB X

doegox compiled a Bus Pirate firmware with optimizations in MPLAB X. With optimizations enabled the main firmware can fit all the add-on modes.

We need some help checking if the optimizations broke anything, please test it if you have an opportunity.

You can get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors Adafruit and Open Source Control Systems.

More MPLAB X

There’s a lot of excitement about Microchip’s new cross-platform PIC development tool called MPLAB X.

The Bus Pirate firmware (v3 branch) is ported to MPLAB X and compiling, check out the new Bus Pirate/MPLAB X developer documentation. There is also a wiki page devoted to everything MPLAB X.

Arhi started with a bug report, and snooped out a debug process with ELF files. There’s a video below the fold.

Please share your MPLAB X experience in the comments or the forum.

Continue reading “More MPLAB X”

Sure Electronics 0805 resistor and capacitor kit

We design around a standard list of parts, but sometimes a nasty analog circuit or bias pin requires a specific resistor or capacitor. The local electronics shop doesn’t sell 0805 or 0603, so that means a Mouser or Digikey order just to get an odd-value part.

After the last time this happened, we wised up and looked at resistor kits. There’s a bunch of different 0805 and 0603 resistor kits on eBay. We thought the 50 resistor and 32 capacitor value kit from Sure Electronic was the best deal at the time, $10 including worldwide shipping.

The eBay pictures show resistors in small bags, but they arrived in paper strips sealed in plastic.  We prefer strips because we put them in plastic sheet covers and file them in binders. Watch out, the values are hand-written and almost indecipherable sometimes, test the part if it really matters.

This was a great purchase. It doesn’t cover the full E-12 range, but it should prevent lots of last-minute part orders. For $10/shipped we have lots of odd R and C values handy for prototyping, that’s just a couple bucks more than shipping on most part orders.

Do you have recommendations for an R or C kit? We’ve also seen inductor and zener diode kits, anyone have experience with those?

Open source PIC USB demo for the IR Toy

Honken has an updated open source USB firmware for PIC microcontrollers. We ported the update to the IR Toy, you can load it up and test it yourself using the bootloader.

This version is much more robust, and a number of bugs were squashed. The first character sent is no longer lost, and strings of up to 8bytes are echoed successfully. If you have an IR Toy, you can try it yourself using a utility like Hercules to send test values.

This major milestone means open source PIC projects can soon do USB with completely open source code. Projects will be easier to compile because they won’t require a separate driver download from Microchip. This will be integrated into the USB IR Toy, Logic Sniffer, and Bus Pirate v4 prototype as soon as possible.

Continue reading “Open source PIC USB demo for the IR Toy”

Free PCB Sunday: Bus Blaster

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 is the first version of the Bus Blaster JTAG programmer. It’s been power-up tested and the FT2232 enumerates on the PC. One of the buffer footprints has mask over pads, so you’ll have to scrape it away before soldering. We have two extra PCBs to give away this week, just ask for one in the comments.

Continue reading “Free PCB Sunday: Bus Blaster”

App note: Digitally controlled DC/DC converter

A digitally controlled DC to DC converter:

You can easily add margining capability (digital adjustment of the output voltage) to a DC/DC converter by adding a 2- or 4-channel, I²C-adjustable current DAC (DS4402 or DS4404) at the converter’s feedback input. Because each DAC output is 0mA at power up, the extra circuitry is transparent to the system until a command is written via the I²C bus.

Thanks for the tip rsdio!

Web Platform and FreeRTOS update

Want to try FreeRTOS on the web platform? Join the hacking in progress in the forum. Current projects include a script interface, Telnet server, hardware CRC, and other performance enhancements.

Grab the FreeRTOS port for the web platform from SVN. Our SVN tutorial is here.

Get an assembled web platform for $40, including worldwide shipping. Web platform v1.1 is in stock and shipping now.

Bus Pirate and FlashRom saved my mainboard

MrHijet writes with a followup to our previous post, The Bus Pirate and Flashrom saved my mainboard:

I already wrote something about the rescue of my computer in my blog, however it was written in german.

I flashed my brand new core i7 mainboard as my processor wasn’t recognized correctly. After that, the mainboard was completely broken. However I connected the Bus Pirate to the mainboard and used a second pc to reflash the BIOS using flashrom. The first flash was running for 8 hours! But I reported all issues at the flashrom mailinglist and the guys helped to speed up flashrom with Bus Pirate so many times that it works much better now. I was so happy to have my mainboard running fine again, I bought a second Bus Pirate and send it as a gift to the main Bus Pirate implementation guys: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger ;-)

Thanks to all who made this possible.

You can get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors Adafruit and Open Source Control Systems.

Via the contact form.

Producing better documentation

NBitWonder sends us a meta how-to, documentation for producing better documentation:

Documentation is fun!  Well… not really, but it’s a necessary evil if you plan to share your projects with the open-source community (or remember how you did something a year or two down the road).  Documentation may not be glamorous, but it’s an important aspect of producing great, repeatable projects and improving one’s skills over time. What sorts of documentation do you need, though? Below we have written some suggestions of documentation you may want to include in your next project.

Bus Pirate PIC programming adapter sold out

The Bus Pirate PIC programming adapters we made for developers are already gone. Seeed Studio is working on a couple more, in case some potential developers missed out.

We started with a cautious 20 units, just for developers. We expected 20 to last a long time, since it’s totally unsupported hardware. Now we’re wondering where they all went.

Did you order one? Do you plan to contribute?