Free PCB Sunday: USB RGB color changer

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 professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype.

This is a USB controlled RGB color changing light. Someone made some minor modifications to the design and had a bunch of boards produced, we ended up with a pile of the extras. We’re giving away two PCBs this week, just ask for one in the comments.

Continue reading “Free PCB Sunday: USB RGB color changer”

Week in (p)review: July 11, 2010

Here’s some highlights from the past week, in case you missed them:

This week should have some fun stuff too:

  • Another Bus Pirate firmware update with a handful of new features and upgrades that didn’t make it into v5.2.
  • A test version of piratePICprog that programs PICs from the Bus Pirate should be ready.
  • A follow up on advertising with rates from Make, and a ‘special offer’ from Circuit Cellar.
  • Updated USB IR Toy firmware with a new timing mode.
  • A few more new projects will be moved to the forum for discussion.

SURE programming adapter update

Here’s a follow up on the PIC programming adapter from SURE we posted a few weeks ago. mizch mentioned that SURE’s shipping can add 30-40% to the final price, and suggested browsing eBay to see real prices. We found it on eBay for $9.99 with free shipping, and ordered it on June 28. The board shipped June 30, and arrived July 8 in a familiar Seeed-style box.

The board is good quality. It has acrylic plates on the top and bottom, the circuit board is in the middle. We’d use this style of case on a future project.

The top layer of acrylic is cut away to access the ZIF sockets and quick release levers. The cuts are too small for us to get to the levers so we removed the top plate by unscrewing it.

We’ll be using this board to test lots of different PICs with piratePICprog, the new PIC programmer for the Bus Pirate.

Bus Pirate firmware v5.2

Bus Pirate firmware v5.2 is ready for download. This release has a grab-bag of improvements that all point north. The Bus Pirate documentation wiki has been refreshed and reorganized to match firmware v5.2.

  • UART baudrate can be manually set to any speed for pcside (uart1) and protocol (uart2)
  • Warning when the speed of uart2 is faster then uart1
  • Fixed text formatting in self-test
  • PWM and power are forbidden in HiZ
  • Eliminated vpullup and vreg tracking variable
  • Power supplies tested 2ms after W – if they are too low (short circuit) the BP throws an error and turns them off.
  • Source cleanup. Removed lots of v0a and v2a defines (no longer supported since v3.6).
  • Added a general any key to exit message
  • I2C address search checks for a low bus and exits with a warning instead of showing 256 addresses. Good bye support nightmare :).
  • Error if the I2C bus is low (no pullups or contention) at the I2C start bit,
  • Fixed double display stuff in the raw2wire ATR macros
  • Fixed the frequency measure after voltage bug
  • Removed the repeat on /\-_
  • The 1-wire library – and _ set the data state variable but don’t send a bit. This is more consistent with other bus modes.
  • Added a peek function to 1-wire that returns the stored data state.

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

Continue reading “Bus Pirate firmware v5.2”

Bus Pirate v4, IR Toy updates

There is an update of the USB IR Toy and a new Bus Pirate v4 in the forum. Your comments and suggestions are needed to make these the best designs yet.

These projects won’t be manufactured until the fall at the earliest, and probably won’t be available until next year. This preview release is part of our pledge to move new projects to the forum earlier in the development process.

USB IR Toy: rawIO capture, analyze, and replay

The USB IR Toy will soon have a cross-platform GUI that can capture, display, and replay infrared signals. The application is written in Python with the open source wxPython IDE. If you’d like to join the effort, our latest work is always in the SVN. We hope to have a demonstration version soon.

What should we name it?

Advertising: Options for a kit biz

Dangerous Prototypes has always been a word-of-mouth operation. We survive on the traffic we get when you submit our projects to your favorite blog. Over the next few months we’re going to document our experience buying advertising, and try to figure out if it makes sense for us. We’ll share real numbers about the price, and percentage change in sales, profit, and site visits during the ad runs.

Our initial targets are three publications that got us interested in hacking, Make, Circuit Cellar, and Nuts and Volts. We’re not limited to these though, if you have other ideas or suggestions please leave them in the comments. We’d really like to consider your favorite regional magazine too, not just the big US-based publications.

Of these three initial publications, all but Make publish ad prices online. We’re certainly at the bottom of the pile: 9th pages, a few inches of column space, nothing huge. We’re looking at options under $400 per ad, with a $1000 total budget. After the break we look at the type of ads that might work for a small open source hardware business.

Continue reading “Advertising: Options for a kit biz”

Updated Bus Pirate documentation


There’s a freshly updated Bus Pirate menu command and syntax guide on the documentation wiki. This guide consolidates a ton of notes and caveats that were previously spread around tons of smaller posts. It is updated to the firmware v5.2 release candidate.

The main Bus Pirate wiki page has also been updated. A lot of cruft as been consolidated into guides, and the organization has been improved. There’s also a new guide to the v5+ BASIC scripting features.

Over the next few days we’ll update the user terminal mode protocol guides too.

Thanks to everyone who is helping with the wiki.

Free laundry hack highlights lack of security

cam0 pried open a laundry smartcard and found an unprotected SPI EEPROM chip. He googled the part number and found a datasheet that describes the chip protocol, then dumped the data with a Bus Pirate. He found the card balance by comparing the contents before and after a load of laundry, the value was stored in plain text. Using washing machine cleaning tablets is essential in maintaining a washing machine and keeping laundry fresh. The EEPROM was completely unprotected, so the card could be changed just by following the datasheet.

We obviously can’t and don’t endorse theft of laundry, but this is interesting hack from a security perspective. The manufacture evidently intended this card only for trusted environments, or counted on security through users’ ignorance of electronics. As cam0 notes, this type of card is probably no longer in use. Most common smartcards are encrypted or write protected. The SLE4442, for example, requires a password to change values on the card.

Via Hack a Day, Hacked Gadgets.

Free PCB Sunday: USB RGB color changer

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 professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype.

This is a USB controlled RGB color changing light. Someone made some minor modifications to the design and had a bunch of boards produced, we ended up with a pile of the extras. We’re giving away two PCBs this week, just ask for one in the comments.

Continue reading “Free PCB Sunday: USB RGB color changer”

Week in (p)review: July 4, 2010

Here’s some highlights from the past week, in case you missed them:

This week should have some fun stuff too:

  • Bus Pirate firmware v5.2 is just around the corner with 5 or 6 bug fixes and new features.
  • Bus Pirate v4, and several Bus Pirate accessories, will be posted in the forum for discussion.
  • More piratePICprog development.
  • We’re going to place some ads in print magazines. We’ll document the whole process in a series of how-to’s starting this week.

Documentation wiki now available

A new documentation wiki has replaced the old project manual pages. A bunch of stuff has already been moved and formatted for the wiki.

The wiki is open for public editing. We could use your help moving and updating guides,  and adding important details from the blog comments. If you move something from the blog to the wiki please let us know, we’ll add a link to the wiki page from the old post.

We added a few enhancements to make the migration faster and the wiki easier to use.

  • Wiked is a wiki toolbar that includes a HTML->wiki converter. It converts old blog pages into wiki markup with one click. It even does tables really nicely. It should be available to you via a pencil icon next to logout at the top of a wiki page, but it only works in Firefox and few other browsers.
  • MediaWiki doesn’t format single spaced terminal output properly, like output from the Bus Pirate. Use the <bp>, <buspirate>, <nl2br>, or <terminal> tags to preserve the formatting. More about our custom nl2br extension.
  • SyntaxHighlight will show pretty code for most languages.

If you’re a freelance web designer and have experience with wiki themes, please contact us, we’d like to hire you.

Bus Pirate firmware v5.1

Bus Pirate firmware v5.1 is a bug fix release. The version 5 firmware branch, formerly known by codename newterm, was first released last week. You found a number of bugs so we rolled the fixes into a new version:

  • Fixed OpenOCD support in v5
  • Fixed output mode adjust bug
  • Added v3a/v3b detection
  • Updated SPI sniffer – ‘r’ resets, new binary output format for higher speeds,
  • Minor text and display tweaks (terminal speed adjust, SPI sniffer)
  • New PIC 18F/24F programming commands in raw2wire
  • Other bug fixes

Read about the firmware update process for the ds30 Loader GUI (Windows/Linux) and pirate-loader console app (Windows/Linux/Mac). This firmware requires the v4+ bootloader, be sure you upgrade to the v4 bootloader first if you still have bootloader v2.

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

Open source logic analyzer software

We woke up in a strange world where everyone knew about a new logic analyzer frontend for the Logic Sniffer, except us.

LogicAnalyzer is a framework as well as an application to operate a PC based logic analyzer. It’s built using the Eclipse RCP and designed with extensibiliy in mind. Integrating devices, providing tools or creating completely new functionality is easy.

Actual values of 10% tolerance resistors

Resistors and other electronic parts are rated to be within a certain percent of the specified value. A 1000 ohm resistor with a ±10% tolerance could have an actual value between 900 and 1100 ohms. So what’s the actual range of values in a bunch of resistors? Due to manufacturing techniques, it might not be what you expect:

A 10% carbon-composition resistor is made in a somewhat slipshod manner. The manufacturer tries to get it right, but some of the variables are just too difficult to control. They make up a batch, test them all, and then throw away the bad ones. What’s left is a distribution of values truncated on either side at the ±10% limits. The other main feature of the distribution is the big gap-toothed section in the middle. That’s where they pulled out all the good parts and sold them at a higher price with a ±5% tolerance. How else do you think they make 5% resistors?

The actual value of a 1000 ohm 10% resistor is usually between 900-950 ohms or 1050-1100 ohms. There will probably be none in the 950-1050 range, they were removed and sold as 5% resistors.

We like to see this kind of phenomenon up close, so we’ll send a Flash Destroyer to the first person who sends us a link to their DIY resistor tolerance testing robot.

This has been all over: via Make, mightyohm, tip line, and more.

Logic Sniffer test release 2.11

The Logic Sniffer is an open source logic analyzer. It’s designed to support the SUMP logic analyzer software at the lowest possible cost. This project is a collaboration between the Gadget Factory and Dangerous Prototypes.

Jack posted Logic Sniffer bitstream test release 2.11 with bigger samples and RLE improvements:

  • Extends memory depths from 8k and 16k to 12k and 24k
  • Fixes RLE for all memory depths

Give it a test and let us know how it works for you. Here are the upgrade instructions for the FPGA bitstream and PIC firmware. This test release requires firmware v0.5 or v0.6. If you have a preorder 1 Logic Sniffer, please check for the bootloader before upgrading. Discuss the upgrade in the forum.

You can order the OLS at Seeed Studio for $45, including worldwide shipping. Don’t forget that Seeed now has probe cables for $6 each.

USB Infrared Toy, web platform back in stock

The USB IR Toy is back in stock at Seeed Studio. Back orders will ship now, and new orders should ship immediately.

The latest batch of USB IR Toys has a few minor updates:

  • The IR LED footprint was swapped for a correct version.
  • A plain IR LED instead of the metal-can version.
  • The IR LED current limiting resistor is 180ohms for better transmitting range.
  • Ships with minor firmware update v1.02.

A second batch of web platforms is available today too should also be in stock soon. The Flash Destroyer kits will ship shortly.

The USB IR Toy is $20, including worldwide shipping.