USB IR Toy

The USB IR Toy is back from manufacturing and is being prepared to ship now. Parts were ready before the Chinese Spring holiday, but then things stalled, Seeed moved, and they’re about two weeks behind. The good news is that our packages from Seeed are now arriving in less than a week again. There should be a continuous stock of IR Toys available after the preorders ship.

Open Logic Sniffer

Parts for the Open Logic Sniffer have been ordered. The PIC 18F24J50 ICs will arrive from Microchip Direct on March 18th. Approximate lead time (assume delays) will be three weeks from then.

Bus Pirate

The latest Bus Pirate preorders should all be shipped. The Bus Pirate should be in continuous stock from now on. You can also pick one up at Adafruit Industries.

Our commitment

You’ve been so patient with our constant delays, availability problems, hardware defects, and all the other foibles of small-run open source hardware manufacturing. We’re trying several ways to improve the process from our end.

We’re learning to design for the situation. We’re checking and doubling checking part availability before a chip goes in a project. Our priority used to be ’sampled or recycled’ (see the awful RS232 transceiver on the first Bus Pirate), but now it’s ‘10K+ available’.

Some part and PCB orders are now placed before a project is published.  This helps reduce lead time and lets us spot show-stopper problems before we go public. The flip side of this is possible shortages for some projects because we’re nervous about committing to a lot of stock.

Project tracking

Each preorder has a status update thread in the forum. We’ll post every update we get, so you can see exactly where the preorder is at. If you’re registered at the forum click ‘notify’ to receive the latest updates by email.

After a few months we’ll study the status updates and design a report page to give statistics on each preorder.

Adafruit Industries now has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship. This is the same gear you get at Seeed, but it ships from the US today. Every Bus Pirate sold at Adafruit contributes to further development of the project.

This is our first distribution deal, and it’s really exciting.  A special thanks to Adafruit for putting up with our noobness and funky supply chain. We’ll have a “how-to” writeup about the distribution experience soon.

Thank you for supporting this project and making it a success.

There’s no update from Seeed about a custom Open Logic Sniffer cable, but Sjaak recommended a few other options from Seeed:

• 1 pin dual-female jumper wire – 300mm ($0.30)
• 1 pin dual-female jumper wire 100mm 50pcs pack ($4.99)

You can pick up an assembled Open Logic Sniffer at Seeed Studio for $45, including worldwide shipping.

Markus Gritsch added a USB power supply jumper to his web platform:

I found it convenient to be able to power the Web Platform using my iPhone USB charger and a normal USB cable.  It is also convenient when presenting the board to friends and powering it using their computer.  Therefore I soldered a pluggable (via two DIL socket pins) connection from the USB power to the 3.3 volts regulator (picture attached).  I measured the consumed current which is about 200 mA, so when powering no additional hardware with the Web Platform it should be ok for most USB ports.

In a future revision of the board maybe a switch could be added to choose the power source, similar to the solution on the Seeeduino.

You can buy an assembled web platform for $40, including worldwide shipping.

The forum migration is complete. You can now access the forum at http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum. All links to the old forum at whereisian.com should forward correctly to the new address with a 301 redirect.

Accounts are all the same, and all the attachments were transferred. There is a bug with attachment thumbnails, but we’ll try to get that worked out soon.

Please let us know if you notice any bugs or issues. Thanks for bearing with us during the changeover.

Update: migration is complete. You can now access the forum at http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum.

The forum will be migrated to http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum starting in a few minutes. Both forums will be locked while we migrate the latest posts. Links to the old URL should be automagically forwarded to the new address.

If you see this message, you’ve landed at our new digs at Laughing Squid. More free PCBs for the first couple commenters, help us test the new install by leaving a comment.

Over the next 24 hours we’re migrating to cloud hosting at Laughing Squid.

WordPress has been a fantastic (and free!) host, but we need to move. We really want the forum to be at dangerousprototypes.com, and we can’t do that with the current setup. The blog domain name is mapped in a way that only WordPress can add a CNAME record to a subdomain (i.e. forum.dangerousprototypes.com).

The DNS changeover should start in the next few hours. After the blog is migrated we’ll freeze the forum to prevent posts while we move the database. A bit of .htaccess foo will forward any old links to whereisian.com/forum to the new forum location.

Since this is the last post at WordPress, we’d like to mark the occasion with a PCB giveaway. We’ll send a free RGB color changer PCB to the first and last commenter on this post. This is the last post from the old blog, the giveaway applied to the post there. We’ll see who is the last to reach the old site within 24 hours.

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 PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. PCBs by Seeed Studio.

This is a PIC and AVR programming adapter for the Bus Pirate (through-hole version). It has a 5pin PIC-ICSP header and a 6pin AVR-ISP header. It also includes a small 13volt boost-converter power supply. A 13volt VPP supply is required to program PIC 12/16/18F microcontrollers. We though it might be useful for clearing the RESET fuse in AVRs too, but that part isn’t going to work (it still has a handy 2×3 ISP connector for programming AVRs though).

We’re giving away two PCBs this week. Just ask for one in the comments.

Some stuff:

• Yes, we’ll mail it anywhere in the world!
• Be sure to use a real e-mail in the address field so we can contact you for shipping info.
• First come, first serve. If we can’t contact the first commenters we move down the list, so you could consider making a request even if it looks like all the PCBs are gone.
• Limit one PCB per address per month.
• Like everything else on this site, PCBs are offered without warranty.

We try to stagger free PCB Sunday posts so every time zone has a chance to participate, but the best way to see the post first is to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Ril3y left a comment on the Lincoln PCB with a few other artistic boards.

Not really a “circuit” but it was an attempt at how cool I could get a pcb. Next is to bake in a circuit next time. I try to use copper to do quite a bit of the words needed too!

Great art! Thanks for the tip!