Standalone Eye-Fi Upload

March 15, 2009 by Eliot 14 Comments

eye-fi

Former Hack a Day contributor [Will] has been using a Eye-Fi SD card to automate his photo transfers. Unfortunately this requires using Eye-Fi’s software and talking to their servers. He used [Jeff Tchang]’s replacement server written in Python to recieve the images from the card. [Will] manages his own online photo gallery using Gallery 2. To get the images uploaded, he added a call to GUP. Now all of his photos are transfered just as easily as with the standard Eye-Fi but without all of the middleman.

[photo: Eye-Fi teardown]

AVR HV Rescue Shield

March 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 4 Comments

rescueshield

While playing with an ATmega168, [Jeff] programmed the RSTDISBL fuse bit. This pretty much makes the chip useless in most cases. [Jeff] didn’t want to give up on it though, so he built a system to program it using the rarely used high voltage parallel programming mode. He used an Arduino, a few lines of code and a few spare parts to make it. After sharing the idea with some fellow programmers, he decided to make an Arduino shield specifically for this purpose. You can use this to reset almost any fuse to rescue a chip. If you are a die hard AVR person and never started using Arduino instead, the STK500 actually has this built in.

BatchPCB Now Even More à La Carte

March 11, 2009 by Eliot 39 Comments

boards

BatchPCB is a low-cost PCB manufacturing service run by retailer SparkFun in cooperation with Gold Phoenix. Using them, you can get your design prototyped for as little as $2.50 a sqin. We used the service in our “How-to: Prepare your Eagle designs for manufacture“. The service collects orders until they have enough to manufacture an entire panel. It may take time to get the boards back, but they’re high quality. BatchPCB just added a brand new feature: Now anyone can list their verfied design files on the ‘products‘ page for other hobbyists to order runs of. Yes, people could always upload free designs themselves, but this makes it much easier to order a board even if the designer has no plans of making a kit of it.

STK500 As An Arduino

March 8, 2009 by Eliot 5 Comments

stkarduino

The AVR STK500 has been Atmel’s standard AVR development platform for many years. Recently though, hobbyists have embraced the Arduino. [Alessandro] has decided to bring the two together so that you can use the Arduino environment with the STK500. Unlike the Arduino, it comes with 8 LEDs, 8 switches, a variable power supply, and variable analog reference. It’s a great way to get hardware you might already have back into service.

New Battery For An HP50G

March 6, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

calc1

According to the author, the HP 50G is an awesome calculator. But as awesome as it is, it is powered off of not-so-awesome AAA batteries. These little batteries don’t last long under the load of the calculators awesomeness, so a mod needed to be done. The battery chosen for installation was a replacement battery for a Sony PSP. He was able to find one, including the external charge regulator board for $10. Dropping it into the case and wiring it to charge off of the existing mini USB port looks fairly simple, very few actual modifications are necessary to the body. Unfortunately, they did end up with an LED protruding from the bottom that makes it wobble a bit, but they’re guessing that they get about 2x the battery life now.

Smart Card Emulator

March 3, 2009 by Eliot 48 Comments

Here’s a quick prototype from [Travis Goodspeed]. It’s a smart card built around an MSP430 microcontroller. We’ve used the MSP430 in the past because of its low power demands. He says this business card currently supports 1.8V to 3.3V, but a future design will have 5V as well. Technologies like Java Card exist for running applets on smart cards, but a familiar microcontroller like the MSP430 could certainly make development much faster. Knowing [Travis], there’s a reader somewhere about to go through some serious fuzzing.

Tools: Aoyue 968 3-in-1 Soldering And Rework Station

February 20, 2009 by Ian 73 Comments

The $10 “fire-starter” is the most common beginner soldering iron. These are simple irons with a hot end, a handle, and little else. There’s no temperature control or indication. Despite their simplicity, they’ll do just about anything. You can solder any legged chip type with this type of iron. We used fire-starters in the lab for years.

Eventually, we wanted a hot air rework tool to salvage SMD parts and solder QFN chips. Aoyue is a relatively unknown Chinese brand that makes soldering stations very similar in appearance and function to Hakko. Aoyue stations are recommended and used by Sparkfun Electronics, something that factored heavily in our decision to buy an Aoyue. Read more about our experiences with this tool after the break.

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