Month: June 2012

Two Interesting Boards Coming Down The Pipe

June 29, 2012 by 20 Comments

Hey, it’s a hardware twofer! Here’s two platforms coming down the pipe:

First up is the Mimo Dreamplug, the latest in a continued expansion of choices for very tiny, single-board Linux computers. The Dreamplug should be extremely capable of just about any task you can throw at it. With a 1.2GHz Marvell Sheeva CPU, eSATA, fiber optic/TOSLINK, WiFi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet connections, and 512 MB of RAM, we’re thinking this could be used for just about anything. It’s a little pricy at $250, but that’s  what you pay for all those features. No idea when it will be available, though. Never mind, you can get the same thing for $150 here. Thanks, [Scott].

Next up is the Kinetis KL25Z Freedom Board, an Arduino-compatable, Cortex-M0+ based dev board being made available for pre-order. The specs on this machine seem pretty good – with a 48MHz ARM chip, on-board accelerometer, a capacitive touch ‘slider’ built into the PCB, and OpenSDA for a USB debug interface, you should be able to make a few cool projects with this board. As a neat bonus, it costs $13, and Freescale is giving away a version of their Codewarrior development environment (limited to 128kB, but that’s all the Flash the Kinetis has). Hopefully, it’ll be a much more open development platform than what our own [Mike Szczys] has been able to wrangle from the STM32 board that has been floating around. The Kinetis should be available this fall.

Thanks [Impulse405] and [Hussam] for sending these tips in.

MakerFaire K.C.: Hexy, The $200 Hexapod Project

June 29, 2012 by 9 Comments

I’ve always loved hexapods. Unfortunately, the cost to play with them can be rather daunting. Hexy is seeking to make a decent impact on that by being only $200. Yep, that $200 includes everything but the computer. You get the entire chassis, micro controller, servos, sensors, batteries, etc.

I ran into [Joe] from arcbotics showing off a hexy at the maker faire and had a few moments to check it out. He showed off some slick motion and explained some future upgrades. It looks like they are intending to go to metal gears in the commercial version which might push the cost to around $250. At this cost, this robot is comparable to the Lego NXT systems.

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Turning An Arduino Into A USB Keyboard

June 29, 2012 by 23 Comments

The newly released Arduino Leonardo has a few very interesting features, most notably the ability to act as a USB keyboard and mouse thanks to the new ATmega 32U4 microcontroller. This feature isn’t exclusive to the Leonoardo, as [Michael] explains in a build he sent in – the lowly Arduino Uno can also serve as a USB HID keyboard with just a firmware update.

The Arduino Uno (and Mega) communicate to your computer through a separate ATmega8U2 microcontroller. Simply by uploading new firmware with the Arduino Device Firmware Upgrade, it’s easy to have your old Arduino board gain some of the features of newer boards such as the Teensy or Leonardo.

[Michael] goes through the steps required to make this upgrade work and ends his build by showing off an Arduinofied ‘cut, copy and paste’ button project as well as a few multimedia controls. You can check those builds out in the video after the break.

If emulating a USB keyboard isn’t your thing, it’s also possible to install LUFA firmware to emulate everything from joysticks to USB audio devices. Very cool, and very useful.

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Dollar Store Terminator Replica

June 28, 2012 by 16 Comments

Okay, now we think [James] is just on a mission to see what he can build using the dollar store as his parts bin. This is the nearly finished replica of the cyborg skeleton from the Terminator franchise. It’s made mostly from things that cost $0.99.

Actually we’ve got that a bit wrong. [James] is really shopping at the £0.99 store but the concept is basically the same. He’s already shown us that he’s a pro at this with the arc reactor replica we recently saw from him. This time around a set of speakers donate their enclosures to build up the spinal column supporting the skull. Fittingly these are glued together using a hot glue gun from the store. The sides of the skull are carefully crafted from a set of four plastic bowls. The jaw comes together thanks to the corners of a plastic box’s lid. And finally the majority of the face is from a golden skull costume mask. Spray it all grey and pop in some LEDs for the eyes and he’s done it! He show’s off his final creation in the video after the break.

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Linux Picture Frame Serves As Wireless Raspberry Pi Display

June 28, 2012 by 13 Comments

Here’s a novel approach to adding a display to your Raspberry Pi. Instead of using a wired display — either via the HDMI (which can feed a DVI port with a simple hardware adapter) or the composite video out — [Chris Bryden] decided to use Bluetooth to provide a wireless display. This really depends on the hardware that you have available. He snapped up a hackable digital picture frame for a song and used the 320×240 display for this project.

You can see the USB nub plugged into the RPi in the image above. It’s a Bluetooth dongle and there’s with a matching one on the digital frame. With the two networked in such a way [Chris] got to work setting up a VNC that would let him pull up the X desktop over the network.

This ends up being one of the best uses we’ve seen for the Bluetooth protocol, and the small screen offers a huge advantage over the use of a simple character display.

Building A CMOS Clock On A Breadboard

June 28, 2012 by 20 Comments

If you’re going to learn digital logic, why not aim high? That’s what [Easton] and his friend did when they built a clock using only 4000-series logic chips. On a breadboard, no less.

For a 1 Hz clock, [Easton] and his friend used a 4060 counter paired with a flip flop. This counts off 59 seconds until, with the help of an AND gate, the seconds counter rolls over to zero. After repeating that again for the minutes and building a similar circuit for the hour, and [Easton] had a working 4000-series 24-hour clock.

The breadboard clock may not be the prettiest thing, or a textbook example of how to prototype circuits,  but that was fixed with [Easton]’s friend’s PCB layout of a 12-hour clock. We couldn’t find any pics of this, but we’re sure it’s awesome and a great way to learn about logic and design.

An Interview With Laen (the Force Behind Dorkbot PDX)

June 28, 2012 by 20 Comments

[PT] recently interviewed [Laen], the man who makes it cheap and easy for hobbiests to have small PCBs manufactured. He created Dorkbot PDX’s PCB group order, a rapid turn PCB service which we see used in projects all the time (pretty much any purple PCB has gone through [Laen]).

Turns out his real name is [James Neal]. He’s a sysadmin by trade but deals in recreational circuitry at night. We were surprised to learn that the service has been rebranded. Its new name is OSH Park and it’s got a purple website with a new submission system. In the interview he discusses the genesis of the service. Inspired by a group parts order (that’s a mouthful!) with other hackers in Portland he saw a need for boards on which to mount them. The service has grown so much that he was spending 2-4 hours per night panelizing the designs. He made the wise choice to include an automated submission service in the new website that takes care of most of this work for him.

The rest of the interview spans a large range of topics. [Laen] shares his feelings on getting the boards manufactured domestically. He speaks briefly on the future of the service, and riffs on why open source hardware has value to him.