Ian is on his way to the Bay Area Maker Faire, and is having a hard time with Air France.

We continue our redesign of the secret board, we are also working on a tutorial explaining how to make separate power planes with Cadsoft Eagle.

Firmware for the Part Ninja is progressing along. We trashed the old code we had for testing, and did a complete rethink on the testing procedure. So far we are able to recognize, and determine the pinout for many 2, and 3 pin semiconductors.

We continue to render images of our projects for marketing purposes.

In the office we sent out this yesterday’s Twitter free PCB coupon codes. We talked with Seeed over a wholesale order we received.

We are off to the Bay Area Maker Faire, and we’d like to share some of the tips we picked up on our previous visit there. Below are our tips for both visitors, and participants. If you are in the area be sure to drop by.

Airport transit: BART subway. We stay in downtown San Francisco for a few days to eat tacos in the Mission District and hang out at Instructables and Noise Bridge. Easily accessible by BART.
Car: Required. Supposedly you can take public transit to Maker Faire: end of BART to CalTrain, but it would still be a whole lot of unpleasant walking along roads. We stay downtown for a few days then take BART back to the airport to pick up the car. Rental cars are pretty cheap in California.
Hotel: Renoir Hotel downtown, Hilton Garden Inn San Mateo secondary conference hotel for the Faire. About a 15 minute drive to Maker Faire.
Event size: Huge and unwieldy. If you’re presenting expect to talk constantly 12hours+ per day.
Food: Taco crawl from 16th and Mission (16th street BART stop, near Noise Bridge hacker space) to 24th and Mission, then down 24th street for even more. If you like hoppy California ales and fancy bratwurst, check out the restaurant on the corner of 24th and Mission before getting back on the BART.
Prepaid data plan: AT&T Go Phone. $2/day unlimited calling, $25 for 500MB data.

Here is a list of our Maker Faire tips for participants:

• Bring a table cloth, tape, etc. You don’t want to be the only one with an ugly table do you?
• Bring extra connectors and cords. If you bring extra you might get an invitation to London by loaning one out.
• Bring business cards. We go through around 2000 in SF and NY, 1000 in Tokyo.
• Check out Hackerspaces close to the faire event. Having a local geek-guide brings you to really awesome places and creates many local contacts.
• Don’t expect internet. Internet is always an issue.

Here is a tutorial on how to build a sous-vide cooker. Sous-Vide cookers cook food placed inside a plastic bag, which is inserted into temperature controlled bath. NerdKits describes all the theory, along with plenty of instruction on how to build your own.

Via Hacked Gadgets.

In our previous Workshop Video we mentioned we asked Pietja to solder up those pesky MMA7455L accelerometers. Here is how he got around to doing it. Check out the pics and his instructions below.

Ian asked me to solder some MMA7455L on the USB POV Toy boards. So when I got them the first thing i did was clean them all with some acetone. After that I pre tinning the pad s of the chip so it had some solder with flux on them.

I did the same thing on the boars and used solder wick to get the solder of but leaving a layer of flux.

Then i placed the chip on the board (no extra flux used, all the flux was from the solder) together with 2 bits of solder so i got an indication of the board temperature.

I used 2 extra boards so only the board i’m reflowing heats up and not the thick A4 sized FR4 board I use as a soldering surface.

After cleaning the flux of with some acetone and cotton swabs

Testing the communication to the chip with my Bus Pirate v4 and using some tape to keep the cable in place because the connector isn’t soldered but kept in the board by bending the pins so there is no need to unsolder it when I’m done

When testing the last board i measured a short between the chip-select and ground

So with the chip removed i charged 4 18000uF capacitors to 15V and pressed the probes to test connector.

After connecting the other end of the test lead to the caps the short just blow away with a nice flash and a little bit of smoke

And with all the boards soldered and tested it was time to ship the back to Ian

He let me keep the board that had the sort in it, when putting some more parts on it I found some more shorts but those had to go with a scalpel.

Pinguino design team released the design for the Pinguino32 PIC32 development board using their Pinguino bootloader. It supports PIC32MX250F128, and PIC32MX220F032B microcontrollers. The design is open source, and made with KICAD  software. Download it from their Google code area.

A few days ago we wrote about the open source USBbug LPC1343 development board designed by Squonk. He started a GitHub page for his project, and shared the first pic of the built board.

Via the forum.

Today we continue to prepare for the Bay area Maker Faire. We also made the workshop video today instead of Thursday, it’ll be about Maker Faire of course. If you subscribe to our YouTube channel you might even be able to preview the video early.

On the design side we continue to adjustment an unnamed project for a final revision. We had some issues with clearance on the rotary encoder knobs and some headers.

We are pushing the Part Ninja firmware for a release. The testing functions have been rewritten to be more modular, and easier to maintain. This will be followed with documentation on how each test is conducted, and the formulas used to determine key values.

In the office we did the payroll cause it’s the 15th, and added Evola to our distributes wiki list.

A while back we started a big box of traveling parts in the forum. We had lots of stuff we didn’t need so we packed it in a box and sent it along to Sjaak. He took some things out, added some goodies, and passed it to Riktw.

Today Riktw posted pictures of his deposit and withdraw. 2 LCDs, some flux, some prototypes, some LEDs, and some miscellaneous open hardware stuff were taken out. This stuff went back into the box (pics below):

• 10 PIC’s, some 16F, some 24H and a DSPic
• Some Atmega328′s with Arduino 0022 bootloader
• Some LPC1113 ARM Cortex M3 devices from NXP
• Altera Max V CPLD breakout board
• Some PCB’s for a 78XX power supply
• 2 Simplecortex PCB’s, old revision(0.5)
• 2 SMD sockets
• 2 1200V 150A IGBT
• Some cheap LED strips
• 2 electronic tubes, both triode

Via the forum.

Exapod is building a line following robot based on the dsPIC33 and stuff he won from SparkFun‘s giveaways. Watch the little robot race through Monza in a video below.

i’m planning of building a robot with a dspic33fj128mc804 and two encoders for implement some dead reckoning algorithms so for learn something on the dspics i build a line-follower, it uses 6 analog sensors that are read with the auto-scan capability of the chip, the pwm is 12 bit and the control loop runs at almost 30 kHz (it only calculates the line position and the do a very simple PD routine that use fixed point math).

Via the forum.