Got my Do-It-Yourself Bus Pirate v3.5a up-and-running!

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The Bus Pirate is a swiss-army-knife-ish tool from Dangerous Prototypes. You can use it to talk to all kind of chips.

It took me some time to get the small components soldered to the PCB. I also had to improvise because the resistor network was not available. So I used some 0603 sized resistors, and put them on the site right onto the board. Because these parts are so small, it’s  a challenge to prevent shortage.

After soldering was ready I tried to program the bootloader using a pickit pic programmer. This went fine. Next I tried loading the firmware using the ds 30 utility included with the bus pirate software. The ds 30 tool failed with the following message:

Searching for bl . The hardware detected a framing error.

Found PIC24HJ128GP310 fw ver. 9.10.9
Wrong pic detected(64)/selected(212), aborting.

Next I loaded full firmware v6.1 using Pickit. No success either: after connecting to my terminal everything looked distorted on the screen. So I replaced the FTDI. No success. So on the forum Ian suggested me to replace the PIC. I did that, now programming with ds 30 went fine. And I have my first self-made Bus Pirate! Now I’m gaining myself some confidence and with this nice tool, debugging my electronic projects will be much more fun!

Just another example of usefulness. This is a humidity and temperature sensor. Just powered by USB.

It consists of the following components:

• Seeeduino V2.21 (Atmega 328P)
• Grove – Temperature&Humidity Sensor Pro
• Grove – OLED 96×96
• Grove – Base Shield

It can be extended as follows. Connect a buzzer, alarm will sound when temperature or humidity falls outside a presettable threshold. Or better: connect it to the internet, for example to Pachube.

Here’s my setup of the termal tweeter, fully inspired by @dangerousprototypes. What it does? It actually prints tweets from twitter!

This project is hacked together from a standard Epson receipt printer, and stuff I found in my drawer.

• Epson TM-T88IV Thermal Printer (RS232 interface)
• FEZ Panda II with FEZ Connect Shield
• MAX232 serial IC
• and some code written in .NET Micro Framework

Why is this particular printer fun? It operates without a personal computer, tablet, iphone or whatever. It’s just hooked up with power and a network cable. A few extra components and it will print my twitter timeline wireless too.

Code is in beta right now, will need some minor improvements. Will give it to anyone interested.

Recently I got my hands on a tlc5940. Goal: try getting this 16-channel LED driver run some LEDs, should be fun.

Looking at the datasheet it was a bit discouraging to get started. However I found this Arduino library written by Alex Leone. It is very well documented, including drawings of a breadboard. So I grabbed my seeeduino and started plugging wires and LEDs. First time success!

One of the example sketches is a circular light buffer. Alex asked to send in some pictures if someone managed to construct a circle of LEDs. Still in lack of a desktop lasercutter , I laserprinted a 16-part pie chart on a piece of paper. Next I pushed the LEDs right through the paper. The hot glue did an excellent job!

Here’s the paper upside down.

It’s still no rocket science. However…. the kids love it!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sXN0kjaDIo]

Welcome to my new blog! I started this blog because I would like to share my tinkering efforts with the world!

On the picture(in random order)

• FEZ Panda II from GHI Electronics
• Rainbowduino led driver running a 8×8 led display from seeeed studio
• XMega XProtolab from gabotronics.
• and an oled display from seeed studio