It’s not everyday that we review software around here, but the folks at Adafruit recently put together an iOS app that I figured might be of interest. Their iPad/iPhone compatible application is called “Circuit Playground”, and it includes all sorts of handy electronics reference tools. For the context of this review, it should be noted that I paid for the application myself, and that I have had no communication with the Adafruit team regarding my assessment of the app.

As you can see from the main screen, the app currently features eight different tools, not counting the “Deals @ Adafruit” entry, since I consider that to be more of a marketing strategy than a real tool. The rest of the items are pretty standard reference fare, in an easy to use and understand package.

The Resistor Value tool is pretty straightforward, allowing you to specify resistance in two ways. You can select the color bands of your resistor and view the resulting value, or enter the resistance to see what color resistor you should be looking for. It supports both 4 and 5 band resistors as you would expect, and features a simple “Instruction Page” (as do all the tools), accessible via the small information icon on the bottom left corner of the screen. One thing I would love to see implemented is the ability to photograph components and display their resistance. I think it would be a very helpful addition for makers whose eyesight isn’t what it used to be.

The Multiple Resistor and Multiple Capacitor tools are similar in function, showing you the resultant resistance/capacitance of various series and parallel component setups. They both support up to 9 items apiece, and let you select the capacitance and resistance values for each component one at a time. This is both good and bad, as it gets pretty tedious entering each value manually after a bit. One other item that I thought could use improvement here was the functionality of switching between series and parallel configurations or adding/removing components. Any time a change is made to the configuration, all of the values are reset – this means that if you add another resistor to your 8-resistor diagram, you must re-enter each and every value.

The LED Resistor Calculator does exactly as its name suggests, much like many online calculators that have come before it. This handy feature lets you pick your LED color from a pre-determined list, populating the forward voltage and current fields automatically, based on some common/standard values. Once you specify a supply voltage and quantity of LEDs, the application returns the exact resistance required to meet your specs, along with the value of the nearest standard resistor. While the tool is certainly helpful when calculating resistors for LEDs in series, it lacks any sort of ability to do the same for parallel configurations. If the folks at Adafruit included that functionality along with the ability to customize the default LED list, I would be thrilled. I do have to point out however, that this tool does retain the LED count and supply voltage when changing LED colors, which is something I was glad to see after playing around with the Multiple Resistor tool.

The Ohm’s Law calculator is a simple tool that is great for allowing me to carry out quick sanity checks of the math I have done in my head. Simply enter two values in the triangle, and Circuit Playground spits out the third. The Power Calculator is a similarly straightforward tool, which takes in two of four values (Power, Voltage, Current, Resistance), calculating the rest for you. Neither tool is overly complicated, but then again they don’t need to be.

The final calculator that the app provides makes number conversions dead simple. Given one number, the converter will give you its representation in binary, decimal, hexadecimal, octal, and ASCII notation. While it might not be something that I’ll use every day, it certainly is a very helpful reference tool. I personally think that this tool would benefit from the ability to convert strings of characters/numbers rather than one at a time, but perhaps that is something they are looking to add in a forthcoming release.

One of Circuit Playground’s features that is not as prominent as the others on the main menu is the built-in datasheet viewer. It uses a lightweight interface to help search through and view PDF files located in the iPhone’s document store. I don’t have anything of the sort stored on my phone so I can’t truly test this portion of the app – let us know in the comments how it works for you.

A few data persistence nitpicks aside, I think that Circuit Playground is a solid app with a lot of potential. At $2.99 it sits at the higher end of the App Store pricing structure, so whether or not these tools are worth it is ultimately up to you. Adafruit does say that anyone who purchases the app gets $3 off their next order in their online store, which essentially makes the app free if you are a regular customer.

While it’s not designed for your seasoned Electrical Engineer, it is definitely a great resource for the part-time tinkerers out there. At the moment, it is an iOS-only offering, but Adafruit says that they will be releasing an Android version at some point in the future. In the meantime, they suggest giving ElectroDroid a try, as it is currently the best app on that platform.

[Marcus] was recently commissioned to put together the electronics for a slick 10 meter long LED installation at the Hsinchu Biomedical Science Park Exhibition Center in Taiwan. While you might assume that he was asked to construct a large LED matrix, this project is a little bit different from what you probably expected.

The display is actually a long light tunnel made up of 30 moving triangles suspended from the ceiling. The triangle movement is governed by 60 separate stepper motors, while the lighting is provided by 30 HL1606 RGB LED strips he picked up from Adafruit. The display’s logic is handled completely by an XMOS controller, which is beefy enough to handle controlling all of the stepper motors and the LEDs simultaneously.

After he hand assembled all of the motor driver boards and tested things in his workshop, the whole lot was shipped over to Taiwan for assembly by the on-site crew. After a bit of troubleshooting, they were able to get things working properly, and the display looks great as you can see from the image above.

[Marcus] says that he doesn’t have video of the display in action just yet, though he will update his post whenever he does.

[Thanks, Paul]

If you weren’t aware, today is [Ada Lovelace] day, so [Ladyada] and Adafruit Industries are spending the day celebrating the achievements of women in the fields of technology, art, engineering, and electronics. Specifically, the focus is on fellow female makers/hackers who are helping shape and promote the industry.

Once every hour, Adafruit Industries is profiling one influential woman, paying tribute to her work and contributions to the tech/maker/art/science space. You’ll see a lot of familiar faces throughout the day, including electronics extraordinaire [Jeri Ellsworth], Make’s own [Becky Stern], as well as [Sherry Huss] and [Louise Glasgow], two of Maker Faire’s leading ladies.

The bios are certainly worth taking a look at – aside from some of the more familiar faces, it’s a great chance to learn about a few makers who you may not have heard of before.

As an added bonus, Adafruit is offering 10% off all purchases from the store using a coupon code that can be found on their site, so be sure to check it out!

[Phillip Torrone] gave us a heads up about a project he and [Limor Fried] along with [Mike Doell] have just wrapped up. Their aptly-named “iCufflinks” softly pulsate with light the same way in which you see many Mac products do.

The cufflinks are made from machined aluminum and have the ubiquitous “power symbol” milled into the face. Inside the cufflinks, you will find a small circuit board and a battery, which powers the device for up to 24 hours. The team reverse-engineered the soft LED pulse found in Mac products in order to deliver the exact same visualization in their cufflinks.

Ignoring for a minute, the name and the inspiration for the product, we think they are pretty darn cool. There’s nothing like a set of softly glowing cufflinks to spark conversation at any social gathering.

Like anything else you’ll find on Adafruit.com, the cufflinks are completely open source, so you can feel free to tweak and remix the design any way you’d like.

Continue reading to see a video of the cufflinks in action.

Sometimes it’s just plain fun to over-engineer. [Stephanie] gets a warm fuzzy feeling when she successfully adds way more electronics components to a project than she really needs – just because she can. We can’t really argue with her if that is the intended goal, nor can we find fault with the sweet Game of Life display she put together.

She started off with six Game of Life kits from Adafruit, but she quickly caught the LED bug and her collection grew until she had 20 kits (that’s 320 LEDs for those of you keeping count). After piecing them all together, they were mounted in a wooden frame and placed behind a dark piece of acrylic. It looked great and worked just fine, but it wasn’t overdone enough for her tastes.

In the end, she added a small Arduino and Xbee module to the Game of Life display, which enables it to be controlled by her network-enabled thermostat we featured a few weeks back. The thermostat was fitted with an Xbee unit as well, which allows it to turn the Game of Life on and off at whatever times [Stephanie] specifies.

We’ll take two please.

[via Adafruit Blog]

[Rossum] just finished porting Zork over to the Microtouch. This hardware, which he originally designed, is now available for purchase through Adafruit. It’s a tiny 320×240 TFT touchscreen, driven by an AVR ATmega32u4 microcontroller. The device draws power from a lithium battery, and also boast a USB connection and a MicroSD slot.

The hack here is getting Zork to run with the limited resources available on the device. [Rossum] needed to emulate the Z80 processor, but didn’t want to use extra hardware in the way that [Sprite_TM] did when he emulated a Z80 using an AVR. Instead, this is based on a stripped-down implementation of Frotz. The final code is too big to fit on the chip along side of the bootloader. This means you’ll need to use an ISP programmer in order to flash this example to the chip. We’re pretty sure that AVRdude can program the ATmega32u4, so pretty much any ISP (including an Arduino) can be used to do the programming.

Microsoft is planning to release Windows drivers for the Kinect this spring, months after open source drivers were developed by a motivated hacking community. [Johnny Chung Lee], who worked with the Microsoft team when the hardware was developed, mentions that he had pushed for the giant to develop and release at least basic Windows drivers. That refusal led him to a position as top cheerleader and bounty contributor in Adafruit’s Open Kinect Contest which resulted (quickly we might add) in the availability of open source drivers. If you’ve been following Hackaday or any other tech blogs the last three months you’ll know that an explosion of projects using the Kinect followed, and [Johnny] figures Microsoft’s decision to release Windows drivers is an attempt to ride this wave on their own flagship OS rather than continue to watch from the sidelines.

I [Caleb], finally had a chance to catch one of the live chat sessions over at Adafruit.com called “Ask an engineer“. I was pleasantly surprised. Though the show is only an hour long, the amount of information covered was quite amazing. They started out, announcing a new, this really cool looking touch screen system, product and going over the tech specs. This very quickly turned into a question and answer session about how to utilize and modify the device. [Limor], aka [ladyada] was extremely knowledgeable and [rossum], the designer who made it even showed up in the chat to fill in the rare gap. After that, there was a general question and answer period where people were firing off questions so fast I couldn’t watch them all and still follow her answers. It was a lot of fun and quite frankly felt way too short.

Be sure to check it out on Saturday night at 10:00 P.M. ET

What is interesting is how Adafruit has chosen to close this contest. Not only are they giving [Hector] his prize money, they are also donating an additional $2,000 to the EFF who fight for our right to legally hack and reverse engineer our own equipment.

[Hector] is being generous as well, using his prize money to help pay for gadgets to hack with some teams he is involved with, mainly the iPhone Dev Team and the Wii hacker team “Twiizers”

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.

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.”

[Phillip Torrone], one of the original crew of HackaDay, now working with [LadyAda] tipped us off to this video of her explaining the device they built for configuring the charging circuits to be used with their solar panels. Unlike most of their tutorials, this one is not intended to be a final product sold on their store. Rather, this is a project that helps them deliver the best quality they can.

The unit itself is built around an Arduino and can log the statistics to an SD card, show battery voltage, panel voltage, and current from panel to charger. You can see in the video above how she uses this to refine her design in real time for optimal results.

Adafruit’s got a handy breakout board for the DS1307 RTC available. This chip isn’t nearly as accurate as the DS3231 used in the Chronodot but it’s quite a bit cheaper. The breakout makes this easy to breadboard or plug into an Arduino and has everything you need; clock crystal, a backup battery, filtering capacitor, and pull-up resistors. Our favorite part is that Adafruit designs are open source so you can etch the board yourself if you checkout the files from their git repository. This will make a great addition to our prototyping hardware collection.

Incidentally, we were surprised to see the choice of 2.2k resistors for the I2C bus pull-ups. We were under the impression that 4.7k was a standard value here. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

Space Invaders came out in 1978, six years after Pong. That means this Space Invaders clock uses newer technology, right? Nope, it’s the same hardware as the Adafruit Pong Clock with some updated firmware. Still, as you can see after the break, the effect is pretty nice. Pong was cool, but having a clock that scrolls through several classic games would be cooler.

[Dataman], the guy responsible for this firmware hack shared his code. It should be easy enough to alter it for any clock using a KS0108 graphic LCD screen. So what’s next? Can someone pull off a black and white Ms. Pac-Man that looks decent on the 128×64 display?

[Thanks PT]

[PT] let us know that Adafruit Industries has just release a pong clock kit. The $80 price tag might seem a bit steep but it does come with a custom-ordered KS0108 display in order to get white on black like the classic video game, as seen after the break. Also included is the laser-cut case, an ATmega328 microcontroller, RTC, and all the other bits needed to get this working.

We just saw a pong clock built on a breadboard using a KS0108 display but that one used a PIC processor. Adafruit always open-sources their designs and code so you can head over to the kit details page if you already have the hardware on hand to throw this together.