Pete decided to try out Cadsoft Eagle and write about his experience. The first impression wasn’t the best.

I finally decided to download and learn to use the industry-standard PCB and schematic layout software: Eagle. I’ve tried a bunch of others, and quite frankly, got tired of always using “also ran” software. The majority of the info on the web is for Eagle. It certainly doesn’t have the best UI or the best workflow, but it has absolutely the most amount of information and the best support from PCB manufacturers. It’s the industry standard, and like most industry-leading technical software (ever use industry-leading 3d modeling software? Gak!), it has some crazy issues.

We’d suggest that Eagle is more a hobbyist and open hardware standard, with much more expensive software dominating the most design shops. We stick with Eagle for exactly the same reasons though. Most people have it, and there’s a ton of documentation out there for it. We’d prefer an open program like KiCAD, but it’s not going to appeal to as many people.

Don’t let the file format dictate your choice though. Every PCB manufacturer worth using supports Gerbers, and every CAD program worth using should have a way to export them.

Victor converted an SMD IC into a through hole device using perfboard, wire, and lots of hot glue. Wire from each lead is soldered to pinheader mounted through a perfboard, and everything is held in place with a giant squeeze of hot-glue.

Raj made a two part tutorial on how to interface a PIC microcontroller with the ACS712 hall-effect current sensor. The first part covers hall-effect theory and basic operation of the ACS712. The second part covers the actual PIC interface, which is simply reading the output voltage of the sensor.

Sensing and controlling current flow is a fundamental requirement in a wide variety of applications including, over-current protection circuits, battery chargers, switching mode power supplies, digital watt meters, programmable current sources, etc. One of the simplest techniques of sensing current is to place a small value resistance (also known as Shunt resistor) in between the load and the ground and measure the voltage drop across it, which in fact, is proportional to the current flowing through it. Whereas this technique is easy and straightforward to implement, it may not be very precise because the value of the shunt resistor slightly varies with its temperature, which in fact is not constant because of the Joule heating. Besides, this simple technique does not provide an isolation between the load and current sensing unit, which is desirable in applications involving high voltage loads.

Project details can be found on the zunkworks RDF page and you can view the PDF of the 28C3 presentation slides here.

Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon:

• Workshop video: USB Persistence of Vision Toy firmware
• Programmable dummy load in this week’s status update post
• Dangerous Prototypes 3D project models
• CPLD breakout board ported to KiCad
• Bus Pirate mentioned in Bruce Perens open hardware lecture
• C library for the Bus Pirate binary scripting mode
• Shuckc has successfully ported the Contiki 2.5 OS to the Web Platform
• Open source soldering iron driver v1.5
• Bus Pirate Arduino Shield free PCB build
• Check out Brendan’s breakout board for the 44pin QFN ATxmega microcontroller, Drew’s Christmas LED card, SadE and Rubu’s infrared cooker for reflow soldering, Mick’s AVR transistor tester  in the project log forum

Coming up:

• Workshop video: Flux trials (sorry, a rendering error prevented us from releasing it this week)
• App notes on the weekend
• Free PCB Sunday
• Free PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday
• Free PCBs via Facebook on Friday
• Weekly roundup and preview every Friday

What are you hacking this week?

I need your help. Realize Inc. is a competitor of mine. I fired my SEO firm for spamming everyone. However, I’m now on page 2 while Realize is top of page 1. They have an unfair advantage over me because I won’t engage in spamming practices. Is there any way that you know of to get Google to push them down or for me to compete without spamming? They are hurting my business tremendously.

We don’t have much advise aside from what what was in the Realize Inc editorial. There’s no way to manipulate search engines in the long run, Google et al have rooms of PhDs dedicated to search quality. Search engines want fresh content and will reward you for it. Start a blog and write about what’s happening in your company, post something every day. Make how-tos about designing for your rapid prototyping processes. Show your machines and give a tutorial on how they work. People will enjoy it and link to you on their blogs, the search engines will eat your yummy content, and your (prospective) customers get extra info to help use your services. Win, win, win. If you do any cool how-tos or tutorials please give us a shout and we’ll post it on our blog.

There’s also a HUGE DIY community doing 3D modeling. Get involved and your name will be synonymous with these services. Many people doing SLA, etc for a hobby are doing it during the day for a big company too (or are students about to move to industry). Realize INC is specifically avoiding this market, but the links from a few DIY blogs are worth a thousand times more than the crappy forum spam links Realize is posting.

Even if you don’t want to do low volumes for hobbyists, there’s other ways to get into the DIY community. We’ve been applying to Protomold for their Cool Idea free mold program because we have a case for one of our projects, but are not big enough to afford a custom mold. They will give us the mold if we win, we buy the actual cases at normal prices – and they get lots of quality info on the web.

None of this is without effort, which is why were so upset with Realize INC. They stole our ranking to improve their own, and justified it because they didn’t have time to write content and had a family. Well…us too! We reported them to various databases for spamming, but I imagine it takes several reports before anything is done otherwise the system is too easy to abuse. However, for a while our editorial about Realize INC spam appeared as the second search result for Realize INC.

Diligent has announced its 8th annual design contest. Student are invited build electronics projects based on their FPGA and PIC development boards. So far the contest has been announced in the US and EU. Unfortunately the EU region registrations are over. The entrants will receive Diligent development systems pertaining to their project needs, which they will be allowed to keep.

To develop innovative projects using Digilent products. These can be:

• Digital design projects featuring Digilent’s FPGA boards, developed in environments such as Xilinx ISE WebPack or ISE Foundation, National Instruments LabView, etc.
• Microcontroller projects featuring Digilent’s PIC-based embedded control boards, developed in environments such as Microchip MPLAB, MPIDE, etc.

Via Embedded-Lab.

JTR released a major updated to the open source USB stack that’s been brewing in the forum. It’s been designed to work with a generic echo demo, the Bus Pirate v4, the USB IR toy, the LCD Backpack, the Locgic Shrimp, and the Logic Sniffer. So far only the CDC class is supported, meaning only virtual COM port communication is possible.

Pretty much this is getting to be the final work on the current generation USB stack and the DP hardware. At least for the time being… While the usb stack is not the latest I have it is the best trade-off between many competing issues and at a level that is fully understood should I need to revisit it. Some hardware got an improved stack and some got rolled back a level so that it was all compatible and modular.

We started a wiki for instructions, notes, demos, and more.

Via the forum.

This WiFi garage door controller is based on an RN-XV WiFi module, a small WiFi capable microcontroller with 8 GPIOs, and 3 ADCs.

The inspiration for this project was simple. My daughter has a habit of forgetting her house key, and we’ve had mixed results with the wireless garage door opener keypad. Time for a new solution. Plus, it’s a great excuse to play with electronics!!! She has an iPhone and it never leaves her side, so that seemed like a reasonable interface to use. Plus, if I network attached it, I could do some other nifty things like control it from the office.

For more information and a link to the code for the Paduino program referenced in the video, see Alasdair’s Daily ACK website.

Alasdair Allen is the author of the book “iOS Sensor Apps with Arduino.”

Via MAKE.