Digital Fanatics

The blog Built to Spec has a story on how to hack a standard RC servo into a brushed DC motor controlled. Basically, the trick is to fool the servo logic into believing that the servo is constantly centered. This makes it possible to control the speed and direction of the brushed DC motor using off the shelf control mechanisms. For the details, read more here.

Definition of Free Cultural Works Logo

The open source movement, which I disrespectfully use as a term for the free software movement, has gone from a obscure group of nerds to the force powering smart-phones, the internet and large parts of our lifes. Taking away the need to re-implement the wheel of software each time, has brought a new playing field. A field where the innovation and added functionality matters more than the history and summed up code-base.

From a high-level viewpoint, the open source approach to software development means that more engineering resources are spent in moving the technology forward, rather than implementing what the competition already have. Another positive aspect is that everyone is invited. A key factor to open source is the liberty granted to your peers. Anyone can use anything as the base for anything. Good for students, good for developing countries, good for building a community instead of a set of fenced off gardens (or rather, walled in).

The open movement within hardware has been along for a long time, but it is growing in strength right now. Powered by the success of projects like OpenRISC and Arduino, the approach has gained popularity. The easy of access means that this often is the first contact with real hardware projects for students and other learners – giving momentum for the future. For the curious, check out openhardware.de, Open Hardware Summit and Open Cores. There are more sites out there – enjoy!

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Theo Labs is working on the MSPism board. It is an MSP430-based board providing ISM radio. The radio portion is provided by, for instance, this board.

The software for the board is currently under heavy development. The end goal is to create a board suitable for building low-power wireless mesh-networking sensor nodes.

Microchip has released the PIC10F(LF)32X and PIC1XF(LF)150X MCUs, each feature new peripherals. Examples as Configurable Logic Cells (CLCs), Complementary Waveform Generators (CWGs) and Numerically Controlled Oscillators (NCOs). This makes it possible to implement functionality that was not possible before with a low pincount microcontroller.

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ORSoC and the OpenRISC architecture has interested me for years. Basically, it is a soft CPU produced without targeting a specific FPGA architecture (as Nios and MicroBlaze does).

It is a RISC design with support from gcc. From version 3.1, the architecture is supported by the mainline Linux kernel, so the software support is nice. On the soft hardware front, i.e. configurable logic designs, the OpenCores site provides loads of peripherals.

On the physical hardware side, ORSoC has just released a new Altera-based board. The board comes with a preconfigured virtual Ubuntu environment, with the tools preinstalled. All this makes it very easy to get started developing for the OpenRISC architecture.

The Raspberry Pi project continues to make progress. A couple of days ago, the gerbers and finals layouts for the PCBs was released.

Being credit card sized, the board looks rather crammed, but thanks to the central SoC, the biggest issue seems to be fitting all the connectors in the confined space, rather than the multitude of components.