Hackaday Links: July 13, 2014

July 13, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Don’t like sunglasses? Deal with it. They’re the pixeley, retro sunglasses from your favorite animated .GIFs, made real in laser cut acrylic. Points of interest include heat-bent frames made out of a single piece of acrylic.

Remember this really small FPGA board? The kickstarter is ending really soon and they’re upgrading it (for an additional $30) with a much better FPGA.

Sparkfun is now hosting the Internet of Things. They’re giving people a tiny bit of space to push data to, and you can also deploy your own server. That’s interesting, and you can expect us doing a full post on this soon.

Need waveforms? [Datanoise] is building a wavetable synthesizer, and he’s put all his waveforms online. Now if we could just get a look at the synth…

If you only have $20 to spend on a board, you’ll want to pick up at Teensy 3.1. [Karl] wrote some bare metal libraries for this awesome board, and while it’s not as extensive as the standard Arduino libs, it’s more than enough to get most projects off the ground. Included are UARTs, string manipulation tools, support for the periodic interval timers on the chip, and FAT and SD card support.

Go On A Power Trip With Powerduino

May 3, 2014 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

powerduino Things don’t always run the way we want them to or operate at the ideal temperature out of the box. Instead of spending extra for power controls that may or may not meet your needs, wouldn’t it make more sense to dial in the ideal level from the source? That’s what [dekuNukem] had in mind when he decided to make Powerduino, an arduino-compatible programmable power strip.

With Powerduino, [dekuNukem] can control the electrical consumption of all kinds of things without ever worrying about the irreversible deadliness of mains voltage. It actually uses a Teensy 3.1 which can be programmed with the Arduino IDE through the micro USB connector. He’s really tricked it out to the point of putting Kill A Watt meters to shame. A wi-fi module lets him control any of the outlets from anywhere, and the RTC module lets him make customized schedules for them. Powerduino has an SD card slot for logging energy consumption, and a 20 x 4 LCD screen makes it easy to directly interface with the power strip.

The Powerduino code is up on GitHub, and [dekuNukem]’s walkthrough video is after the jump.

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Bare-metal Programming On The Teensy 3

April 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

Teensy

The Teensy 3.x series of boards are amazing pieces of work, with a tiny, breadboard-friendly footprint, an improbable number of IO pins, and a powerful processor, all for under $20. [Karl Lunt] loves nearly all the features of the Teensy 3, except for one: the Arduino IDE. Yes, the most terrible, most popular IDE in existence. To fix this problem, [Karl] set up a bare-metal development environment, and lucky us, he’s chosen to share it with us.

[Karl] is using CodeBench Lite for the compiler, linker, assembler, and all that other GCC fun, but the CodeSourcery suite doesn’t have an IDE. Visual Studio 2008 Express is [Karl]’s environment of choice, but just about every other IDE out there will do the same job. Of course a make utility will be needed, and grabbing the docs for the Freescale K20 microcontroller wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.

The end result is [Karl] being able to develop for the Teensy 3.X with the IDE of his choice. He was able to quickly set up a ‘blink a LED’ program with the new toolchain, although uploading the files to the Teensy does require the Teensy Loader app.

The 128 Button, 6 Axis, 17 Slider, 4 POV Hat Switch Joystick Controller

February 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

stick

[Paul Stoffregen], creator of the Teensy series of dev boards, previously implemented a six-axis joystick for Teensyduino, the Arduino library for the Teensy. He had originally tried 8 axes, but a few problems cropped up, deadlines approached, and he left it as is. A few recent projects gave him some insight into how to implement a joystick with more than six axes as a USB HID device, so he started looking at how to read an improbable amount of pots and buttons for a USB joystick.

So far, the biggest problem is figuring out what software can actually use an HID joystick with this many controls. The answer to that question is none. The Linux-based jstest-gtk is able to read 6+17 pots, the four hat switches, but only 64 of the 128 buttons. A user on the Teensy forums, [Pointy], has been working on his own joystick test app that works on ~~Linux~~ Windows, but testing the joystick on Windows is an exercise in futility for reasons no one can figure out.

As for why anyone would want a six-axis, 17-slider, 128-button joystick, think about this: with this much control, it would be relatively simple to build the MIDI controller to end all MIDI controllers, or a cockpit simulator for everything from a C172, 737, to a Kerbal interplanetary cruiser. That’s an impressive amount of control, and all from a $20 Teensy dev board.

Further testing of this Teensy joystick is desperately needed, so if you’re able to help out drop a note in the forum thread.

Meet The Teensy 3.1

December 9, 2013 by Mathieu Stephan 50 Comments

[Paul Stoffregen] just released an updated version of his Teensy 3.0, meet the oddly named Teensy 3.1. For our readers that don’t recall, the Teensy 3.0 is a 32 bit ARM Cortex-M4 based development platform supported by the Arduino IDE (using the Teensyduino add-on). The newest version has the same size, shape & pinout, is compatible with code written for the Teensy 3.0 and provides several new features as well.

The Flash has doubled, the RAM has quadrupled (from 16K to 64K) allowing much more advanced applications. The Cortex-M4 core frequency is 72MHz (48MHz on the Teensy 3.0) and the digital inputs are 5V volts compatible. Pins 3 and 4 gained CAN bus functions. The new microcontroller used even has a 12 bits Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) so you could create a simple signal generator like the one shown in the picture above. Programming is done through the USB port, which can later behave as host or slave once your application is launched. Finally, the price tag ($19.80) is in our opinion very reasonable.

Embedded below is an interview with its creator [Paul Stroffregen].

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