…since I stopped updating this religiously, and in that time, we have done quite a few projects! So here is the quasi semi annual update, with hopefully ambitious plans to start blogging again!
Project 1: The time machine!
Probably one of the most significant projects we tackled was changing our house’s phone lines to an internal paging system. This required tracking down all of the different pairs of wires involved in the phone system and seeing how they connected to each other. The following are some of the instructables that came out of that.
The reason we wanted to do this, besides being able to call each other from any floor of the house, was to work on our “Time Machine” - a system that could get onto the internet but using mostly old school technology.
After taking apart the phone system, we wanted to update the upper floor of our house with bamboo floors instead of the old carpet and linoleum. Here is the during:
And here is the after (but still before cleaning things up):
Things have since been cleaned up quite a bit, which leads us to our next project of the year!
Project 3: Cyphercon 2016 Badges
@Goetzman brought us onto the Cyphercon team to make their badges and it was a pretty fun experience, and definitely one where we learned a lot more about the manufacturing process:
275 of them were hand soldered! It was pretty much nonstop solder pasting for me. Each board was then individually reflowed and tested. And finally switches were soldered on. When I get more close up pictures, I’ll be sure to show you all.
The green ones are those who paid for the Friday portion of the conference. The white ones are the normal con goers. The blue was the speakers, black were the vip, and the red were the life-timers. There’s more information on them on http://hackthebadge.com/
And if you’d like to continue checking our projects, I created a reddit that I treat like our forums. Our previous forums decided to get too much bot traffic and that didn’t make our server provider happy :p Woops.
At some point in the past, I wrote a blog post about USB PIDs/VIDs and Hackaday recently released a post about a company that was willing to give out PIDs to qualified open source USB projects. Now I don’t think about this everyday, so I was a bit rusty and asked why this was necessary. The following is a summary of what I was taught!
It seems that if you use a USB to serial chip, such as one of FTDI’s many offerings, you can use their PID/VID. The PID is what allows the OS to figure out what drivers to load. Since all FT232x (for instance) have the same driver requirements, people just usually use FTDI’s VID/PID. Ie, it’s only relevant for drivers for the USB to 232 chip.
FTDI has drivers for various other variants of theirs, but in each case their chip is a single-function device, so it’s easier to write generic drivers. But if you’re writing something based on an ATMega32U4, for instance, you’ll need your own PID, since it could do anything.
IE. The ATMega32U4 can be used as an USB to serial chip, as well as anything else you’re able to make it do. So using the ATMega32U4 decreases the number of parts for the board since you don’t need to include a dedicated USB to Serial chip. And of course the MCU of your choice can do anything else - you can make an HID device, or any other number of kinds of devices.
Anyway! So that’s why you might want your own PID - if you’re getting rid of the specific USB to serial chip on your board, and rolling that functionality into a chip that’s doing something else.
For as long as I’ve known Whisker, he’s been into chiptunes. It only makes sense therefore that given half a chance, he would make his own chiptunes. And so he has! We are so proud to present Whisker’s debut album “A Bonny Caper” - composed, programmed, and arranged by Whisker using the simple but effective technology behind a Gameboy DMG!
Please take a listen, retweet, share, let others know who enjoy chiptunes, and let us know what you think!
in asking questions or contacting us with cool ideas - please feel free to join our chat room @ http://tymkrs.com/chat. Unfortunately I’m not in the habit of checking tumblr messages and I’m afraid I’ve let some long time readers wait a VERY long time for a response! Apologies for that!
So if you’re an electronics fan or have some question on a project, you’re welcome to join our global hackerspace of engineer miscreants :D
Tymkrs Analog Shift Kit: This is pretty neat, it is a PIC which acts like a DAC and as a shift register. It allows you to convert a 7-bit digital value into an analog value between 0 to 3.3V, and allows the serial data to pass through (if desired) to another module. (https://www.tindie.com/products/tymkrs/tymkrs-analog-shift-kit/)
Tymkrs AND8 Module: This is a module with 8 AND gates where one side of each gate is controlled by the output of a 74hc595 shift register and the other side of each gate is controlled by the input of 8 signals of your choice. (https://www.tindie.com/products/tymkrs/tymkrs-and8-module/)
Tymkrs Jack Me Kit: This is a kit which breaks out 2 quarter-inch jacks. The jacks can be connected to each other, or they could be used to send audio signals through your breadboardable circuit - and vice versa! (https://www.tindie.com/products/tymkrs/tymkrs-jack-me/)
…since we posted a new blog, but we have been extremely busy! We’ve been focusing on creating more music-related modules since the holidays last year and I’d love for you guys to take a look and ask questions. I’m in charge of documentation and while I know some of the things I should include, by no means do I know all!
Today we’ll be showing a demo video of a project our friend @wireengineer put together with a PIC16f1705 and the Turn Me Kit. The kit is a quadrature encoder with pulldown resistors and allows you to use one with only 5 wires: + / - / Switch / A / B
But we wanted to show it working with a PIC, and Peter suggested we show a servo reacting to the encoder being turned. And sure enough, the following information does just that. When you turn the encoder left, the servo turns left until it ends. When you turn the encoder right, the servo turns right until it ends. And when you push the switch on the encoder down, it centers from whereever it is.
Anonymous asked:
Hello,i am seting up a connection between a sensor connected to an xbee on one end an an xbee mounted on arduino uno on the other end,so everything seems to be fine and i am reading tha API frames on the serial monitor but only for a short time and then the Xbee on the arduino seems to lose connection with the other xbee can you explain what to do???
It’s hard to say what it could be without seeing your code, and what the sensor is….