Tiny Arduino Clone

Posted on December 21, 2012 by e8johan

A couple of days back, we wrote about Kimio Kosaka’s amazing freeform Arduino clone. This artist of electronics is not a one hit wonder. He has done more work around the Arduino. For instance, his one-chip clones are real works of art.

Below, you can see the evolved version of his first incarnation of the concept. It really does look like a cybernetic bug than a simple Arduino circuit.

Taking the concept further, the next incarnation carries a USB-port. If you thought carrying an Arduino around to play with took too much space, this is the way to go.

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The real Pong

Posted on December 19, 2012 by e8johan

Pong, Reborn - ImgurThe classic game of pong has been reimplemented many times in different settings. For the purist, the right way of doing it is to base the replica on the original schematics. This imgur album shows how Pong is built in 74LS. The PCB is beautiful in its symmetry and simplicitly. The simple genius of electronics of the past fully visible.

Via osnews.

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Arduino IDE for Advanced Users

Posted on December 17, 2012 by e8johan

Having used the Arduino IDE for a while, it is easy to find oneself limited. I can sympathize with the purpose of the tool – simplicity makes it easier to learn.

For those of us who still enjoy the ease of use of the Arduino, but wants a more complex environment, there is MariaMole.

MariaMole is an open source project creating a more advanced Arduino IDE. It complements the existing Arduino IDE and maintains the good parts of the classic IDE (i.e. Arduino libraries, ease of download, etc). At the same time, it can handle multiple projects at once, multiple simultaneous serial port sessions, etc. You can also tweak the the build process for better control.

The only limitation is that it is tied to the Windows platform for now, so now we only need someone to port it to Qt for portability :-)

Via Hackaday.

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Low-cost Devboard

Posted on December 14, 2012 by e8johan

Imagine running a course around Arduino. As soon as you start drawing a crowd, the hardware cost will be significant. Enter the Shrimp.

The Shrimp is an ultra-slim, low-cost Arduino clone. Bringing the price down to about £8, almost a third of an Arduino, this makes easy to use programmable logic even easier to reach.

Via hackaday.

Posted in Arduino, Electronics | 2 Comments

Amazing Freeform Arduino

Posted on December 7, 2012 by e8johan

Freeform, or dead bug style, electronics intrigues me. It can be the quick route for simple circuits, but to Kimio Kosaka, simplicity and ease of assembling was not the end goal. His amazing Metaboard-based design can even use shields.

I think that the description on the artist’s page summarizes the project best:

“0’baka Project” means a stupid project. This project is to make things which is not art and which is not usable. Now, I am making Arduino skeleton by using steel wires.

Via Make.

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Build a Custom FPGA

Posted on December 3, 2012 by e8johan

FPGAs are monsters of flexible logic. If you have a problem that can be pipelined or run in parallel  you can perform miracles. If performance isn’t your focus, you can emulate beautiful machines from the past.

Over at Nick’s blog, there is a great article on how he built his own FPGA out of discrete components. This is of course not a very efficient way to cram many transistors into a limited space, but a great way to learn how and FPGA actually is put together.

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A Raw OS for the Pi

Posted on November 30, 2012 by e8johan

Cambridge University hosts a course called baking Pi. Yes, it is not a spelling mistake, it is about our beloved Raspberry Pi.

The course teaches about operating system fundamentals by implementing a basic OS on the bare metal of the pi. For all of us not attending university at Cambridge the teaching material is available on-line. If you are feeling like writing some low level code is assembly, head on over to the course.

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The Folding Arduino Lab

Posted on November 26, 2012 by e8johan

Have you ever wanted to travel with your Arduino, a breadboard or perhaps a couple of shields? Of course, you’d also want to bring a set of components, just to be able to tinker with it. Now you can!

Thanks to jasonwelsh and his Folding Arduino Lab. You will find drawings, instructions and a demonstration video over at Thingiverse.

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Arduino Updated

Posted on November 23, 2012 by e8johan

The Arduino platform has been under pressure for a while now. The project that enabled embedded computing power for all makers out there has been falling behind on the CPU side. Still, it has maintained its position as one of the easiest platforms to develop for available.

All this changes with the Arduino DUE board. The board changes much of what we know about Arduinos. The CPU is an ARM clocked at 84MHz, the signal level 3.3V. 95kB of RAM with half a megabyte of FLASH means that the software run is less limited by size.

Released the 22nd last month, you should be able to get your hands on the hardware through your usual supplier.

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4bit Transistor Computer

Posted on November 16, 2012 by e8johan

The nice people over at Waiting for Friday has written a nice story on how to build a simple 4-Bit_Computer. Calling it a computer might be a bit over the top, it is actually a small adder circuit.

The nice thing about the design is that it is built from transistors. All the steps involved are explained, from binary addition, logic gates, all the way down to how to build each electrical sub-component.

For those of you who do not want to read the text, there is a video summarizing the contents as well. Well worth watching!

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