Summer means tank-tops, air-conditioner installation and new kits!
This kit is something I’ve wanted for a while. Its an all-through-hole USB AVR programmer for a bit over $20, with both 6 and 10 pin cables and a jumper for powering the target board from the USB hub’s 5V power. It can also be used with SpokePOV kits to upload images and configuration (finally!)
A simple open-source USB AVR programmer and SPI interface. It is low cost, easy to make, works great with avrdude, is AVRStudio-compatible and tested under Windows and MacOS X. Perfect for students and beginners, or as a backup programmer.
The project is based off of the USBtiny code & design. The main improvements are: adjusting the code to allow it to act as a SpokePOV interface, adding lowlevel bitbang commands, and addition of a “USB good” LED. Other changes are new VID/PID (to make it official), removing some of the commands, and moving around the pins a bit.
You can build this design using the schematic and firmware, or buy a kit from the Adafruit webshop. Having a full kit available solves the “chicken & egg” problem of purchasing or building a USB programmer that then needs a programmer of some sort to ‘kick start’. (See USBasp, AVRdoper, USBprog)
All the firmware code is distributed under the GPL, the hardware design layout files are CC 2.5 Attrib./Share-alike
AtomicSalad went out of control with his Digg Button hacking. Not only a clever removable programming interface! Not just new firmware! Also, a music video staring Angelina Jolie as The Digg Button. Look well, children, one day you will be studying this man’s work in History of Modern Film
Social bookmarking integration is all-the-web2.0-rage. But looking at the costs, can you really afford to run your own? Server upgrades, bandwidth allocation, spam management…What a headache! Here’s a simple way for you to add a social-networking system to anything you own, for a minimal investment: The Digg Button Kit!
The Digg button is a very simple beginner electronics that teaches how to solder and program microcontrollers. Once made, this basic electronic project mimics the popular Digg.com website: each time you push the button, the button flashes “Dug” and increments the counter up to 999 “diggs”. The project is completely open source and documented, including parts list, schematics and code. For those who don’t want to try to chase down the electronic components, we have a full kit ready to go in the Adafruit webshop.
We already have a couple simple projects to get people started: how to power it from USB or batteries, how to make it scroll a simple message, etc. We’ll be updating the mods as more people get their hands on the kits.
For every sale of the Digg button kit we’re giving $1 to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). The kit is currently in its first release; new colors and other projects will be available. We even have a plan for making it interface directly to digg.com! (Stay tuned…)
These two articles (Kitmakers and Kitmaking) cover things from how to deal with shipping & handling, to designing PCBs, to documentation and customer support. Check them out and make suggestions!
Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) isn’t new, but its certainly gaining traction. Its a wonderful product for people who have a lot of content on their site (images, video, downloads, pdfs) but not a lot of money. Data storage costs $0.15 per GB-Month (prorated), and $0.20 per GB. No minimums, rounded up to the nearest cent.
There are a lot of great providers out there (I use Laughing Squid and highly recommend it) but even LS’s ‘largest’ package is too small for ladyada.net… What to do? Easy: Host all that bulky content at S3, then use mod_rewrite to reroute it over to S3. (You could also do it with php, asp or similar for higher ’security’ but mod_rewrite is lighter and good enough for me)
For example, this image has the url reference “http://www.ladyada.net/images/mintyboost/assemblyv12/inductorusbplace_t.jpg” but if you access that url in your browser, it is automatically rewritten by apache to http://s3.amazonaws.com/ladyadanet_mintyboost/assemblyv12/inductorusbplace_t.jpg
(same with my research pdf, a big pdf that easily accounted for 500M a day of traffic at its peak! http://www.ladyada.net/media/common/thesis.pdf -> http://s3.amazonaws.com/ladyadanet_common/thesis.pdf , S3 doesn’t care what the data is or how its encoded)
Of course mod_rewrite is not necessary, you can always just directly reference s3.amazonaws.com but that makes it harder to move the content around if you decide to eventually go with another service (or if s3 goes away one day!)
OK so, what’s the point and what does this have to do with electronics, eh? Well one of the killer apps of open source and public domain electronics is documentation. That means media. And media storage, backup and transfer is extremely expensive for the everyday person. It becomes increasingly difficult to host a project when one digg-storm or slashdotting makes that ‘free’ webpage account go down.
Edit: I use the Firefox S3 plugin to upload and set the access control on my files.
Are you using S3 or something similar for your projects, kits or documentation? Leave a comment or email! Its always interesting to see what other people are doing in this space.
Mix & Match soldering irons, multimeters and wire cutters to get the set that fits you best.
Click “Read the rest…” to see the full “basic kit” as of this moment (it won’t be updated so be sure to bookmark http://www.ladyada.net/library/equipt-kits.html instead ) (more…)
I’ve updated the shop with the latest revision of the Mintyboost kit. The newest kits have two possible locations for R5 so that the latest iPods and the Zune, etc. will work just fine without any hacks. New instructions are up, too.
I’m experimenting with nicer silkscreens, as you can see these kits now come with white mask and black silk. I also finally figured out how to import custom graphics into EagleCAD (the importbmp.ulp script) so I’ve put the adafruit logo on!
I fixed some icky problems (in wxMIDI!) and now the MIDIsense software is crosscompiling nicely between Mac and Windows, therefore there is now fast and updated software for both platforms. Rad! Download it now!
I’ve completely revamped the SpokePOV software for both Mac OS X and Windows. The interface is better, the image handling is nicer, the download/uploads are faster. There’s even a debugging wizard that will help you figure out why it might not be working.
If you’ve had any problems before, you should check this out! And let me know how it works for you - good and bad. (Just comment here or post on the forum)
