How-to: Bus Pirate V1, Improved Universal Serial Interface

January 22, 2009 by Ian 65 Comments

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We use the Bus Pirate to interface a new chip without writing code or designing a PCB. Based on your feedback, and our experience using the original Bus Pirate to demonstrate various parts, we updated the design with new features and cheaper components.

There’s also a firmware update for both Bus Pirate hardware versions, with bug fixes, and a PC AT keyboard decoder. Check out the new Hack a Day Bus Pirate page, and browse the Bus Pirate source code in our Google code SVN repository.

We cover the design updates and interface a digital to analog converter below.

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How-to: Prepare Your Eagle Designs For Manufacture

January 15, 2009 by Ian 47 Comments

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Cadsoft Eagle is a multi-platform freeware circuit layout program. Lots of open source hardware is designed in Eagle, and it’s become a hobbyist favorite. We use it for all of our hardware designs.

There are several ways to turn an Eagle design into an actual printed circuit board (PCB). We’ll show you how to save Eagle designs as industry-standard gerber files that are accepted by any PCB manufacturer. You can use the gerbers to order a single prototype, or a full panel.

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How-to: Digital Picture Frame, 100% DIY

January 8, 2009 by Ian 50 Comments

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There are a ton of digital picture frame tutorials out there. Most are old laptops with crafty case reconfigurations that fit a photo frame profile.

We set out to build a 100% DIY, scratch-built digital picture frame. Our frame has a 12bit color LCD, gigabytes of storage on common, FAT-formatted microSD cards, and you can build it at home. We’ve got the details below.

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Parts: Digital Proximity Sensor (Sharp GP2Y0D02)

January 5, 2009 by Ian 19 Comments

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The GP2Y0D02 is an infrared proximity sensor with a detection field that extends 80cm. This type of sensor can be used to build collision avoidance systems for robots. We’ll demonstrate this sensor using a single resistor and a multimeter.

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Parts: I2C Digital Thermometer (TC74)

January 2, 2009 by Ian 18 Comments

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Microchip’s TC74 is an inexpensive digital temperature sensor with a simple I2C interface. It has a resolution of 1 degree Celsius, and a range of -40 to +125 degrees. This is an easy way to add temperature measurement to a project without an analog to digital converter. We’ll show you how to use the TC74 below.

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Parts: Precision Humidity And Temperature Sensor (SHT1x/7x)

December 29, 2008 by Ian 21 Comments

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Sensirion’s SHTxx is a digitally interfaced humidity and temperature sensor. Accurate humidity measurements usually require careful analog design, but the SHTxx moves all that complicated stuff into a single chip. Through-hole (SHT7x) and surface mount (SHT1x) versions are available, we used the surface mount SHT11 with +/-3% accuracy. We’ll show you how to use the SHTxx below.

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Parts: 8bit IO Expander (PCF8574)

December 27, 2008 by Ian 28 Comments

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Sometimes a project has more sensors, buttons, or LEDs than your microcontroller has pins. The PCF8574 is an easy way to add 8 low-speed input or output pins to a microcontroller. A configurable address lets multiple PCF8574s exist on the same bus, so two microcontroller pins can control dozens of IO pins. We’ll show you how to use this chip below.

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