Google has announced that it will be sponsoring a $20,000 prize at the 2011 CanSecWest Pwn2Own Contest. $20,ooo will be given to the first person to escape Chrome’s sandbox through Google-written code in the first day. If researchers are unsuccessful on the first day, then days two and three will be opened up to non-Google-written code. In addition to the cash, there is also a Google CR-48 running ChromeOS offered as a prize, but it will not be the actual platform used to hack Chrome. We look forward to seeing what comes out of this contest.

[via GearLog]

[Mr. Kim] and [John Sarik] made a presentation(pdf) at last weekend’s Botacon conference on how they made organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). A wooden RepRap, the fancifully named Unicorn from Makerbot (or printed from Thingiverse), hacked felt pen, a handful of chemicals, and a couple of pieces of lab equipment were needed to print (plot) out transistors. We were unable to attend the conference, so this is what we inferred from the slides. Silver ink is printed onto a glass slide to form the gate regions, cured and partially masked-off. A layer of CP1 Resin is spin-coated onto the slide to form the dielectric barrier between the gate and the semiconductor, the drain, and source regions. Silver ink is once again used, this time to print out the drain and source regions. The last thing printed is P3HT dissolved in toluene to form the semiconductor region. It would be interesting to see this process modified so that all coatings and curing can be done without removing the slide from the printer.

[Jody] wanted to know when his garage door was open. He details his setup which uses a temperature sensor read by an Arduino to send over XBee radio to a computer running a Windows Service. We have seen this twice before, and is noteworthy as a lesson. The XBee radios have the ability to read analog data, relay digital signals, and a lot more. This means the Arduino is completely unnecessary. For example, the Tweet-a-Watt uses two of an XBee’s ADCs to measure voltage and current in a Kill-a-Watt power meter. Programming an XBee is really simple, with the help of tutorials from SparkFun and Adafruit. A bit of programming and soldering should get [Jody] back his Arduino. We hope this note will help you find more creative uses of XBees without microcontrollers.

[Via Make]

[Robert] wanted more out of his GE Color Effects G-35 LED Christmas lights. He reverse engineered and then hacked the protocol the lights use to communicate so that he can control each bulb. A 26-bit frame contains a 6-bit address, an 8-bit brightness value, and a 12-bit color value. The daisy chain topology of the data bus allows for modular bulbs with addresses enumerated during the startup of the string of lights. With this information, a 5 volt capable microcontroller is able to control a whole string of these lights with a refresh rate of up to 24Hz. In this case, [Robert] used an ATtiny13A microcontroller to control the string of lights. You can see a video of them in action after the break.

Also taken apart and analyzed, were the wireless transmitter and receiver that came with the lights, revealing a cheap ISM band receiver and transmitter module pair. Perhaps they will be useful for another project. We look forward to seeing people put these hacked lights to use throughout the year.

[via Make]

[Jeri Ellsworth] has put together a couple of videos that cover how she made her own organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDs. In the first video, after the break, it discusses the difference between regular, rigid semiconductor LEDs and organic LEDs. The video then goes on to show how to make an OLED as successive layers of materials. Indium tin oxide (ITO) on glass forms a transparent anode. That is then coated with PEDOT:PSS, a conductive polymer mix that is used as a hole transport layer. Then a red diamond ruthenium complex is added to create the emissive layer. The cathode layer is a low work function metal, initially, gallium indium eutectic alloy then later other metals were shown to work. The second video, shows how to juice a glowstick and make OLEDs with the liquid. The dye in blue glowsticks, 9,10-Diphenylanthracene, is an organic semiconductor and will emit light as an electric current is passed through it. The glow stick method seems to have some problems as the ITO coated glass plate is degraded by the glowstick chemicals. It would be interesting to see if using the porous aluminum or similar technique from [Jeri]‘s flexible electroluminescent displays could be used as an electrode.

Are you looking for a good source of information to get started into making and hacking electric circuits? We would like to refer you to Lessons in Electric Circuits. Even if you have good knowledge of electronics, this is another tool you can use. The book is a work in progress and will have some incomplete and pending areas, but the basic theory parts to get started are all there. It has six volumes: DC, AC, Semiconductors, Digital, Reference, and Experiments. The DC and AC volumes are the most complete. If your eyes are already glazing over thinking you already know all of this stuff, then the most interesting volume for you may be the Experiments, which contains a number of sample circuits like transistor amplifiers and 555 timer circuits. The best part of this book it that it is free, but as with most free things, you can make it better by contributing.

Via Adafruit Industries.

Adafruit has a new LED tutorial for people wanting to get started with electronics. It is full of useful diagrams, pictures, and quizzes to help make sure you are understanding the concepts. This is the real basic stuff here: LEDs, resistors, and the laws from Kirchhoff, and Ohm. It starts out explaining the parts of an LED. Then variations of LEDs: illumination versus indication, clear versus diffused, brightness, color, and size. The mass of the tutorial covers how and why an LED’s brightness can be changed by a resistor and why a resistor is needed to keep an LED from burning out. Such as how Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law works with Ohm’s Law to help you determine the proper resistor for an LED. If you found useful the other beginner concepts posts about Analog Circuits and Electronics basics from the Giz, you should find this tutorial to be useful.

[Jeri Ellsworth] is back at it again. We seem to cover her work a lot here. Her latest video above covers how she created a point contact transistor from a 1N34 germanium cat whisker diode. After opening the glass casing on the diode, she uses sharpened phosphor bronze metal from common electrical connectors as the collector and emitter. A 330 microfarad capacitor charged to 20 volts and then discharged though a 680 ohm resistor to the base and collector leads forms the collector region. Her test jig is a simple oscillator circuit such that a properly formed transistor will start the circuit oscillating and make and audible sound. We look forward to more esoteric knowledge of electronic devices being brought to our attention.

Full of video and audio sensors, the newly released Kinect is Microsoft’s answer to Nintendo’s Wii MotionPlus and Sony’s PlayStation Move. Now there is money up for grabs to hack it. Adafruit is offering up a one thousand dollar prize to open source the driver for the Kinect. What do they want this driver to do? They want RGB and distance values. We’re excited to see the hacks that will come around because of this product, and now that prize money is involved, everything has been turned up a notch.

Update: The bounty has been raised to $2000 after a Microsoft response to CNET:

But Microsoft isn’t taking kindly to the bounty offer. “Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products,” a company spokesperson told CNET. “With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

Pogo pins – spring-loaded pin contacts are pretty fun to play with and even cooler when they get used in electronic devices like Adafruit and SparkFun’s test jigs. Check after the break for how these two companies have created their own production hacks.

At Adafruit, they build up from an Arduino with a proto shield. An unpopulated board is loaded with pogo test pins and then connected to the proto shield. The board rests on and is aligned with standoffs. The latest Adafruit test jig needs to have an extended test, so instead of mashing a finger against the test board for an extended period of time, they use “ears” to hold the board in place during testing.

At SparkFun, they used to do something similar to what Adafruit is doing now. Now with BatchPCB as the prototyping arm of the company, they make one-off boards for their test beds. For  each test bed, three boards are made, all made based on the Eagle files of the board the bed will be testing. The bottom board keeps all of the test pads from the original board and enlarges the holes for the pogo pins, and then adds circuitry needed for the board test. The middle board has enlarged holes for the tips of the pogo pins to just barely stick through and is what the board under test rests on. The top board is just for alignment.

We could see these devices getting extended to having buttons that are pressed when a board is in place so the tests would begin automatically. Add a robotic arm, and the whole thing would be automated. Scale-up the jig for whole panels of boards. We would like to see more of the hacks people make just to make in production.

Arguably, Microchip’s PIC microcontrollers do not get enough posts here. One of the drawbacks for some of us is that Linux support for PICs is not very well known. The information is out there, but no one has laid out the process of going from writing C code to programming a chip. Written for Linux users that are familiar with microcontrollers, basic circuits, the C programming language, and can read a datasheet, this how-to should get you up and programming a PIC quickly with Linux.

The Compiler:

The Small Device C Compiler, sdcc is what will be used to create the .hex file needed to program a PIC. Support for PICs is still growing, and still in beta, so be aware that things outside the code and chips of this article may need some debugging. However, like every other open source project out there, more contributing users will help the project. Best of all, it is free, with ports to Windows and MacOS X, this is a compiler that handles many architectures and devices without the program limit of free versions of for-pay compilers that are limited to Windows. Sdcc is available through various distributions’ package managers including Ubuntu and Fedora.

To install sdcc on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install sdcc

To install sdcc on Fedora:

sudo yum install sdcc

The Chips:

Three different PIC chips were used in the writing of this tutorial: the 40 pin PIC16F887, the 14 pin PIC16F688, and the 8 pin PIC12F675. You can follow along with any of these chips as well as other chips.

The Programmer:

We will be using two programmers, Olimex’s PICStart+ compatible PIC-MCP-USB programmer, and Microchip’s PICkit 2. Both programmers have been tested to work with the three chips used here.

The PICStart+ programmers use the picp program. Most any PICStart+ compatible programmer will work with picp. Easily installed in Ubuntu with:

<pre>sudo apt-get install picp

For Fedora and other distributions may have to download and install it from source. So, in an empty directory of your choosing:

wget http://home.pacbell.net/theposts/picmicro/picp-0.6.8.tar.gz
tar -xzf picp-0.6.8.tar.gz
cd picp-0.6.8
make
sudo make install

The source is on [Jeff Post]‘s Development Tools for PIC programmers page along with other programming options.

If you will be using the PIC16F887 and picp, you will need to modify your /etc/picp/picdevrc file by adding the following lines:

[16F887]
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
PICSTART

[16F887:def]
20 00 3f ff 3f ff 00 7f
00 7f 3f ff 3f ff 00 ff
00 ff 00 00 00 00 00 00
0D 10 20 00 04 20 07 02
00 00 01 00 00 00 00 00
00 01 22 0f

[16F887:defx]
3f ff 07 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
3f ff 07 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

The above lines are  modified parameters for PIC16F886 found in a post by [Al Williams]. For chips not already in /etc/picp/picdevrc, additional parameters will need to be added to /etc/picp/picdevrc.

PICkit 2 programmers will work with another program called pk2cmd hosted by Microchip here. You will need to install pk2cmd from source. so in a directory of your choosing:

wget http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/pk2cmdv1.20LinuxMacSource.tar.gz
tar -xzf pk2cmdv1.20LinuxMacSource.tar.gz
cd pk2cmdv1.20LinuxMacSource
make linux
sudo make install

Note that Microchip touts the PICkit 3 as a replacement for the PICkit 2. It is not a replacement for the PICkit 2 as there are no Linux drivers for the PICkit 3, so do not buy the PICkit 3 thinking it will work in Linux.

There is also another program that claims to work with a range of DIY PIC programmers: PICPgm. We have not tried this program or any of the DIY programmers at this point. We know there are other PIC programmers out there, both cheap and expensive, that have not been mentioned. Perhaps a PIC programmer roundup is in need of writing.

The Code:

The code for this how-to is a kind of hello world program using LEDs. The code for this is hosted on Github, you can follow along with the blink.c file for the PIC16F887, PIC16F688, or PIC12F675. Also included are working .hex files. Here is the PIC16F887 code as a reference as we walk through each major operation:

//Simple program to get started programming
//PIC microcontrollers in Linux.
//Written by Devlin Thyne.
//Released to the public domain.

#include "pic/pic16f887.h"

//Use these configuration words:
//0x2ff4 0x3fff

//Set the configuration words:
unsigned int at _CONFIG1 configWord1 = 0x2FF4;
unsigned int at _CONFIG2 configWord2 = 0x3fff;

//To compile:
//sdcc -mpic14 -p16f887 blink.c

//To program the chip using picp:
//Assuming /dev/ttyUSB0 is the serial port.

//Erase the chip:
//picp /dev/ttyUSB0 16f887 -ef

//Write the program:
//picp /dev/ttyUSB0 16f887 -wp blink.hex

//Write the configuration words (optional):
//picp /dev/ttyUSB0 16f887 -wc 0x2ff4 0x3fff

//Doing it all at once: erasing, programming, and reading back config words:
//picp /dev/ttyUSB0 16f887 -ef -wp blink.hex -rc

//To program the chip using pk2cmd:
//pk2cmd -M -PPIC16f887 -Fblink.hex

//Setup variables
unsigned char ucharCount = 0;
unsigned int uintDelayCount = 0;

void main(void)
{
	//Set PORTC to all outputs
	TRISC = 0x00;

	ucharCount = 0;
	uintDelayCount = 0;

	//Loop forever
	while ( 1 )
	{
		//Delay Loop
		while ( uintDelayCount < 10000 )
		{
			//Increment the loop counter
			uintDelayCount++;
		}

		//Reset delay loop counter
		uintDelayCount = 0;

		//Increment the count
		ucharCount++;

		//Display the count on the PORTC pins
		PORTC = ucharCount;

	}

}

The first line is the #include for the header file of the particular chip you will be using. It tells the compiler which registers are available and where they are located in memory. In most systems, the header files will be in /usr/share/sdcc/include.

Then we setup the configuration word or words fuses. They are only able to be written when the chip is programmed, but we can define them here so we don’t have to manually program them later. The PIC16F887 has the address for the configuration words defined in its header file as _CONFIG1 and _CONFIG2. The PIC16F688 and PIC12F675 do not have the configuration word address defined in their header (we said sdcc was in beta, didn’t we?), so we just use the address of the configuration word: 0×2007. The configuration words are specific to the chip model and application and are described in the chapter “Special Features of the CPU” in each of the respective chips’ datasheets. In the blink.c samples, the configuration word is just a 16bit hexadecimal word, but the word can be made more human readable by ANDing together the configuration options. Check out the chips’ header files for the names of the options.

Next, we setup some global variables, one for the value that will be output on the LEDs and the other for a delay counter.

In the void main(), we set the PORTC tristate register, TRISC to all outputs. The PIC12F675 has only one port, GPIO, and its tristate register is TRISIO. After setting the tristate register, we enter an infinite loop with while(1). Inside that loop is a delay loop so that we can see the LEDs changing. Following the delay loop, the display counter is incremented and then written to PORTC (or GPIO) for display on the LEDs.

Compiling the Code:

Now that we have reviewed the code, it is time to turn it into something a PIC can use. sdcc will take the blink.c file and make a bunch of files. One of these files will be blink.hex which will be what the PIC device programmer will be writing to the PIC. Here’s how:

For the PIC16F887:

sdcc -mpic14 -p16f887 blink.c

For the PIC16F688:

sdcc -mpic14 -p16f688 blink.c

For the PIC12F675:

sdcc -mpic14 -p12f675 blink.c

The -mpic14 option tells sdcc that it will be compiling for the 14-bit instructions of the PIC16 and PIC12 families. The second option is the specific chip that code will be compiled for. The last thing on the line is the file containing the C code that will be compiled.

Programming the Chip:

To program a chip you will take your device programmer and connect the chip you want to load with your program. Unless you are using a socket programmer like the PIC-MCP-USB, you will need to consult the datasheets of the programmer and the chip to be programmed for the proper connection. Once properly connected, you will need to run the program to run the programmer:

For a PICStart+ programmer on /dev/ttyUSB0 programming a PIC16F887 :

picp /dev/ttyUSB0 16f887 -ef -wp blink.hex -rc

For a PICkit 2 programmer programming a PIC16F887:

pk2cmd -M -PPIC16f887 -Fblink.hex

If you are programming another chip, or the PICStart+ programmer is on a port besides /dev/ttyUSB0, you will need to make corresponding changes to the commands.

Note: The code provided for the PIC16F887 disables low-voltage programming. Some of the programmers available but not directly mentioned only perform low-voltage programming. If you have one of these programmers, you will need to change the code so that the low-voltage programming bit in the configuration words allows for low-voltage programming. The low-voltage programming pin on the microcontroller will also need to be pulled low during normal operation.

Wire the Circuit:

The circuit for this project with the code provided is really simple to breadboard. Below are the schematics for the three chips:

Start out by connecting the Vdd pins to a positive voltage source between 4.5 volts and 6 volts and the Vss pin to ground. The 40 pin PIC16F887 and the 14 pin PIC16F688 will both need a pullup resistor on their master clear pin. To any one or all of the PORTC pins (or GPIO pins for the PIC12F675), connect LEDs with current-limiting resistors to ground. Note that pin 4 of the PIC12F675 is only an input and will not light an LED. The current out of any pin of the three chips used is limited to 20mA, so the current-limiting resistors are optional for most cheap jellybean LEDs. What you should see when you power up the circuit are blinking LEDs. The LEDs should be lighting to a binary count.

Your turn!

Now that we have given you a start with programming PICs using Linux, we hope to see more projects using these chips and the tools we have mentioned above. Though this article was written for Linux users, Windows and MacOS X users should be able to use sdcc for their PIC programming needs.

Image information: The Tux logo is by Larry Ewing, Simon Budig, and Anja Gerwinski, via Wikimedia Commons. The Microchip logo is a registered trademark of Microchip Technology Incorporated.

The Arduino Team presented some new products at Maker Faire this weekend. It’s a significant update. The Arduino UNO and Arduino Mega 2560 update the Duemilanove and Mega respectively. They now use an ATMega8U2 instead of an FTDI USB to serial converter chip. Allowing an Arduino to become nearly any kind of USB device. A fourth mounting hole has been added to the UNO for more stable mounting. The booloader is now the Optiboot bootloader. The boards can run firmata out of the box. We are not sure about existing Arduino boards, but the last six bytes of EEPROM have a unique serial number. At this point, the Mega 2560 has some kind of issue with gcc on certain platforms and unable to use the full memory available until there is an update to the IDE.

The team also gave a preview of some works in progress. Arduino Ethernet POE can be power over ethernet and loaded with TFTP. Available October 18, TinkerKit will be released. Geared toward designers, the kit has PCB modules that include a joystick, soft pots, transistor, relay, power MOSFET, push button, LEDs and motor driver. That same day will be the launch of the multi-lingual Arduino Store.

These developments will be a nice addition to the toolset out there that you can use and we look forward to new projects using these tools.

Update: [PT] sent us a link to an ever-growing FAQ about this hardware.

A quick heads-up to those of you that will be at the New York Maker Faire and the Open Hardware Summit.One of our writers, [Devlin Thyne], will be there checking out projects and handing out Hack a Day stickers. Be sure to stop him to say hello and maybe show off your projects. We look forward to seeing you and your projects.

What do you do after you make a BeagleBoard graphing calculator? [Matt] over at Liquidware Antipasto made a BeagleBoard Elastic R Cluster that fits in a briefcase. Ten BeagleBoards, are connected to each other though USB to ethernet adapters and a pair of ethernet switches connected to a wireless router. The cost for this cluster comes in around $2000 and while consuming less than 40 watts of power, out-paces a $4500 laptop. How might you use this cluster? What improvements would you make?

Our favorite Soviet-Era display that found its way into a present-day kit now displays time from orbiting satellites. A GPS module patched into an Ice Tube Clock with modified firmware will be able to provide a satellite-synced time. The firmware, modified by yours truly, parses the GPS module’s NMEA RMC sentences for the time and date information and then updates the clock’s time and date. Fun was had making sure the alarm went off at the correct times when the time was updated by the GPS. Overall, it was a fun project and we look forward to seeing additional Ice Tube Clock hacks.