Tag Archives: Workshop Update

Today we concentrated on completing the ‘clutch’ patch for the Bus Pirate. It keeps the pins in HiZ on the start of every protocol, and only sets them to output if the power supply command ‘W’ is entered. To disengage the clutch again you just need to turn off the power supplies with the command […]

We continue working on the Bus Pirate Education Kit, and the VFD module. We also made the video a day early which covers the above mentioned projects. In Bus Pirate firmware we’re working on adding a ‘clutch’ mechanism to our protocols. It came about due to the fact that under some protocols the device connected […]

VFD module for the giant Nixie blob (pictured above) is coming together. Getting all the leads in the right hole was a pain. We received another box of PCB prototypes from Seeed. Were working on adapting the Bus Pirate v3.6 gerbers to Hackvanna’s PCB and solder stencil service.

We received our PCBs for our VFD tube project. In the meantime we continue to prepare the Bus Pirate Educational Kit. In parallel to the kit, we are pushing to fix all the bugs that have crept up into the Bus Pirate over the years.

We worked on our Bus Pirate educational kit today. We implemented the pull up voltage control from the binary scripting mode for Bus Pirate v4. It should now work in all protocols with the command 0x51 for 3.3V, 0x52 for 5V, and 0x50 to switch them off. Changing the read display mode on the fly […]

We cleaned up the old Bus Pirate SVN repository, and left pointers to the new firmware source in the Dangerous Prototypes repository. This should prevent some confusion. We finished up today and next weeks videos, and got interviewed by EEWeb. We’re working to implement control over the pull up voltages in Bus Pirate v4’s binary […]

Today we worked on implementing patches to the Bus Pirate that Mrmr was kind enough to contribute in the forum. The two patches fix some issues we had with the frequency measurement function of the Bus Pirate. The first patch fixes our long integer to string conversion function which added ‘0’ where it shouldn’t have. […]

Continued development of Bus Pirate educational kit. We sketched out a few box designs (higher resolution image tweeted), finalized a list of parts to include, and layed out a website. The Dangerous Prototypes partkit is back on the radar too, we may have a test batch available in a few weeks. We worked on the […]

Nearly completed travel, meals, and entertainment log for tax year 2012. Filed Iowa state sales tax for the free PCB store experiment. Paid federal and state 4th quarter estimated taxes. Super important hint: Federal tax payment with EFTPS.gov is free, but you need to do it a few days in advance. Also filed 2012 1099-MISC […]

We’ve installed a second, duplicate WordPress blog to try to sort our the comments posting problem. We also searched for and wrote up the app note posts for this weekend.

Getting back from the holidays, new electronics toys in hand. Blog comments are much improved and all the server errors seem the be fixed. Posting a comment still takes 10-15 seconds though, so we ran the blog with some debugging plugins. No specific problem has been located yet, but we’re getting closer. Finished Beers in […]

Today we continued to organize our free PCB drawer. We sorted PCBs and started a year-end inventory.

Today we built some boxes to help us organize the free PCB drawer. Hopefully we can get them out quicker than ever. Look for a stock update in the free PCB store soon. More on that soon. During the reorganization we stumbled across these 6 orphaned PCBs, and it seemed in the holiday spirit to […]

  Today we mostly worked on the 3D model and rendering. We’ll be in the forum tomorrow if anyone needs help with their Christmas boards.

We’ve been spreading holiday cheer. Postponing Beers in Akiba’s workshop video until next Thursday, sorry about not posting a video this week. We continue working on the breadboard power supply. Image by .:oomlout:. : CC BY-SA

Today we made some final adjustments to our latest video, and finished up our end-of-year accounting. We worked on our standard PCBs templates. The “DPXXXX” label that used to be fixed on the bottom of the template is now movable, and editable.

We finished tomorrow’s video a day early. Refining wholesale order process to make it easier on the awesome resellers who work with us. We finished yesterdays squared sized Sick of Beige case render. We made a quick revision of Bus Pirate v3.6 with micro USB instead of the mini-b USB connector. We continue with the […]

Today we’re editing the video tour of Freak Labs with Akiba. Complete Sick of Beige case set is ready to go on sale and should be listed at Seeed shortly. Also complete and ready for sale is a DP6037 sized proto-board. It’s a classic 0.1″ pitch perforated board that is designed to fit our DP6037 […]

We mailed a big batch of free PCBs today. We’ve given away over 600 PCBs since the Zencart store was brought online last year. Server maintenance will happen shortly. It should fix some bad lag for logged-in WordPress users (mostly blog authors). We ordered some Bus Pirate giveaway sets for Tokyo Hackerspace fundraiser. Tracked down […]

Today we did our end-of-year administrative stuff. We also searched and wrote up the app note posts for this weekend. On the hardware side we started designing a simple fused fixed voltage breadboard power supply image by Ken Teegardin: CC BY-SA 2.0.