Coming, hopefully, by the end of the week.
Bus Pirate AVRDUDE tutorial
Michal posted detailed instructions for programming AVRs with the Bus Pirate and AVRDUDE. But what happens if you have 2, 3, or even 7 AVRs on the same circuit board? Michal shows us how to use extra Bus Pirate pins to select among AVRs, or drive a 1-to-8 decoder to control even more chips.
Michal is also the author who added Bus Pirate support to AVRDUDE. Thanks for expanding the Bus Pirate universe!
Bus Pirate IC test PCB
A discussion in the forum led to the creation of a new chip demonstration/test PCB for the Bus Pirate. This board has spaces for several commonly-sampled I2C and 1-Wire devices, and an HD44780 LCD tester:
I2C
- 24LC EEPROM (PTH and SMD)
- TC74 temperature sensor (PTH)
- DS1085(L)/DS1077(L) frequency generator (SMD)
- PCF8563/DS1307 real-time clock (PTH)
- MCP3021 analog to digital converter (SMD)
- MCP4725 digital to analog converter (SMD)
- PCF8574 I/O expander, compatible with Bus Pirate HD44780 LCD tester (PTH)
1-Wire
- DS2431 EEPROM (PTH)
- DS1822 temperature sensor (PTH)
- DS2450 analog to digital converter (SMD)
- Extra footprints for TO-92 1-wire devices
HD44780 LCDs
- The PCF8574 is routed to an LCD connector that’s compatible with the Bus Pirate’s LCD library.
Our plan is to make a few the next time we order PCBs, and give them away. We can probably squeeze a few more chips onto the board if you have any requests. Are there any other chips you’d like to see on this board, either from our existing demos or maybe a new device?
Unbricking a WRT320N router with the Bus Pirate
If you’d like to hack your router, check out this thread about unbricking a WRT320N router using the Bus Pirate. There’s lots of good information about how to connect the Bus Pirate and reset the router.
In related Bus Pirate news:
- We fixed a reported bug in the live UART monitor macro. An updated nightly compile is available in the project SVN.
- Seeed Studio is now shipping Bus Pirate preorder 3. We finally met the initial demand, and there are now extra Bus Pirates available for immediate delivery. Thanks to everyone who has supported this project!
Photo by Uwe.
Flashrom GUI frontend
Sean Nelson has a design preview of a GUI frontend for the open source Flashrom utility. Carl-Daniel Hailfinger recently added support for the Bus Pirate to Flashrom, we covered it here.
Free PCB Sunday: Hackable Christmas ornament
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 week we’re giving away free PCBs for the Hackable Christmas ornament. We made these for family and friends this holiday, but due to minimum order sizes we got twice what we needed. The extra ornaments are available at Seeed Studio as a $12 surface mount kit, and Seeed will assemble yours for $3 more ($15 assembled).
Continue reading “Free PCB Sunday: Hackable Christmas ornament”
#twatch PHP library
Joost De Cock created a PHP control library for the #twatch. This video gives an overview of the features.
Thanks Joost!
Edit: Philippe Alexandre has an updated #twatch Perl control library as well.
The #twatch Twitter scrolling, ethernet LCD backpack is currently in stock at Seeed Studio for $30, or $45 with an LCD attached. Prices include worldwide shipping. An acrylic frame is $2.50.
Bus Pirate high voltage supply with only 6 parts
We used the Bus Pirate and 6 common components to multiply 5volts to over 120volts with a boost converter, a type of switched-mode power supply. Similar circuits are commonly used to power 180volt nixie tubes from low voltage power supplies. This circuit is a simple way to build your first SMPS, but be careful because it could potentially output hundreds of volts!
This post was inspired by Robots and Dinosaurs Bus Pirate-driven high voltage Geiger tube power source, and the need for a 13volt supply for the Bus Pirate PIC programmer. We’ve got a detailed writeup after the break.
You can buy a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping.
Continue reading “Bus Pirate high voltage supply with only 6 parts”
Hackable Christmas ornament to ship
Seeed Studio sent word that the Hackable Christmas ornament is out of production and should start shipping in a few days, about 2 weeks early. Great job Seeed!
There’s still a couple of ornaments available. A surface mount kit is $12, and Seeed will assemble yours for $3 more ($15 assembled).
#twatch frame
Twitter user Tinyblob tweeted a photo of the #twatch in an acrylic frame.
The #twatch Twitter scrolling, ethernet LCD backpack is currently in stock at Seeed Studio for $30, or $45 with an LCD attached, including worldwide shipping. The acrylic frame is $2.50.
Bus Pirate review
Design News posted an introduction to the Bus Pirate with a short review:
Thumbs up
I think Bus Pirate is an interesting project and a very useful tool to have available at the price. I think a great addition to this project would be a GUI front end that would allow you to point/click to configure it and create macros, logging all of the commands used so that once completed the log can be reused as a script in the future.
A commenter picked out the primary design goal for the Bus Pirate concept:
There are other FTDI-based USB adapters/custom boards that provide direct drivers but additional programming & design is required (on both the PC side and the PIC/USB side).
There’s lots of USB->serial protocol devices out there. Most of them offload programming from a microcontroller to a custom Windows DLL. You’re still stuck writing code for an unknown device, but with an additional layer of obfuscation and unknown errors. The Bus Pirate concept is the opposite of high-level abstraction. It’s a tool to learn about a chip interface at a very basic level.
When we sit down with a new chip, we open the datasheet on one half of the screen and a serial terminal on the other. We use the Bus Pirate to play with the chip functions while reading through the datasheet, without writing code or burning firmware. Most of the Bus Pirate source is public domain, so you can use the proven code in your final design without any restrictions.
You can buy Bus Pirate v3 for $30, including worldwide shipping. The most recent preorder (preorder 3) should start shipping this week.
FTDI 5 minute support response
FTDI tech support took less than 5 minutes to respond to our hardware-related query. Where have you gotten excellent support?
Public domain photo by DustyDingo.
Import images into Cadsoft Eagle
We’re trying to take it up a notch by adding the Dangerous Prototype logo to future PCBs. We weren’t sure how to do this in Cadsoft Eagle, so we thought we’d share what we did.
The Cadsoft miscellaneous downloads page has a number of utilities and Perl scripts that convert images to Eagle compatible scripts. We tried a few, and liked BMP2EAGLE the best. BMP2EAGLE works by converting simple monochrome bitmap images into dots that can be drawn in Eagle with a script.
- The bitmap format used by our usual photo editor wasn’t compatible with BMP2EAGLE. We saved the logo as a large (450px wide) GIF file, loaded that in Windows Paint and saved it as a BMP. Windows Paint outputs a compatible format.
- Start BMP2EAGLE and load the image file.
- The ‘Scale’ setting determines how big each bitmap pixel will be in Eagle. We got the best ‘resolution’ by using a large image and small scale value (0.2mils per pixel) to produce a small logo.
- BMP2EAGLE scripts draw the black areas of the bitmap, tick ‘Negative’ if you’d rather draw the white areas.
- Click start to output the script.
- Open Eagle and create a new part library, then create a new package.
- Run the script (file->script) to draw the image on the new package. Save the library.
- Load the library for use (library->use). Add the logo from the library directly to the PCB (there’s no schematic component).
Maybe this will help someone else import a logo or image into Eagle. There’s a few other conversion utilities in the Cadsoft miscellaneous download folder if BMP2EAGE doesn’t work for you.
Bus Pirate support in Flashrom project
Flashrom is an open source utility for working with flash storage chips. It supports a bunch of flash chips commonly used on motherboards to hold the system BIOS.
biosflasher (Carl-Daniel Hailfinger) recently added Bus Pirate support to Flashrom. It should be possible to program SPI flash chips using the next release of Flashrom and the Bus Pirate hardware.
The C source code might be helpful for anyone adding Bus Pirate support to another app.
We sent biosflasher a Hackable LED Christmas Ornament in appreciation of all the hard work. Thanks biosflasher!
Bus Pirate probe cable unboxing
s3c shared this picture of a Seeed probe cable kit (left) and a homemade cable (right). What we liked most was getting a glimpse at the workspace.
#twatch: PCBs available at Seeed
Seeed Studio has v2 Twitter Watcher #twatch PCBs for $6, be sure to get the right ethernet jack ($1.90). These are the extra boards from our Fusion PCB service order (formerly propaganda PCB service).
Assembled versions of our Twitter ticking, ethernet LCD backpack are also available for immediate shipment. A #twatch with LCD is $45, an assembled #twatch PCB is $30, prices include worldwide shipping.
Free PCB Sunday: Hackable Christmas ornament
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 week we’re giving away free PCBs for the Hackable Christmas ornament. We made these for family and friends this holiday, but due to minimum order sizes we got twice what we needed. The extra ornaments are available at Seeed Studio as a $12 surface mount kit, and Seeed will assemble yours for $3 more ($15 assembled).
Continue reading “Free PCB Sunday: Hackable Christmas ornament”
USBprog
USBprog is an open source multi-chip programmer. It currently programs AVRs with an ISP mkII clone, does JTAG debugging with OpenOCD, and some other stuff.
We’re going to take a close look at the source and protocol used with OpenOCD to see if it can be implemented in the Bus Pirate.
Thanks for the tip (and photo) Uwe!
Zeno zit zapper tip reset
The Zeno is an acne treatment device with disposable tips that are electronically limited to 45 or 60 uses. Matt did a system teardown that revealed a Cypress cy8c27443 microcontroller in the main unit and a 128byte I2C EEPROM in the tip. He used the Bus Pirate to sniff I2C traffic going to the EEPROM in the tip, and then used standard I2C EEPROM write operations to reset the use counter.
It’s amazing where you find microcontrollers, and this is a fantastic use of the Bus Pirate. However, this hack tampers with an FDA-approved medical device that controls heat applied to the skin. An interesting academic exercise, but please don’t reuse the tips!
Via the forum.
The 'us too!' Black Friday post
Today is Black Friday, the bustiest shopping day in the US. Every kit-biz is promoting their wares (Adafruit, Make, HacknMod), here’s our plug.
In the past three months we’ve released three geeky open source projects that you can buy at Seeed Studio:
- #twatch network LCD and Twitter scroller ($45 w/LCD, $30 without, shipped)
- Bus Pirate universal serial interface ($30, including worldwide shipping)
- Hackable Christmas card and ornament ($12 kit, $15 assembled)
Seeed also has some accessories, such as:
- Bus Pirate probe cable kit ($4.50)
- #twatch acrylic frame ($2.50)
We’re proud to work with Seeed Studio to make copies of our open source projects available. When there are cheap rapid prototyping machines you’ll be able to print our projects at home, until then, there’s Seeed Studio. Seeed has inexpensive worldwide shipping starting from $2.85, most of our projects include shipping in the cost.