News @ Suspect Devices

Tag: Wiring

  • Arduino Programmer

    This was started at http://www.thing-a-day.com/2008/02/04/day-4-thing-4-aduino-adaboot-programmer/My Bulky Prototype

    It is part of the way that I do programming on the avr platform and the Arduino.

    I was using the programming half of a a bulky prototype that I have been working on to program an RBBa based maze solving mouse and I looked at the pile hanging precariously off of the coffee table and thought to myself.

    “I need to just build one of these. “

    The finished product
    Modifying Sparkfun Board. to fit in the box the input side
    flea assembly blinkin lights in place
    test run Translucence done  

    So I did.

    The programmer is based on the Auto-Reset Hack and the AdaBoot bootloader. The reset is pulled by putting a capacitor on the DTR line of the serial interface which is also the bootloader interface. Most people put the cap on the Arduino but I put it on the programmer (where it belongs). This programmer was built using the ftdi ft232rl breakout board sold by sparkfun. I had to trim it down to get it to fit in the pretty blue box i bought at Tap Plastics. The chip out of the box presents two of its 4 gpio (general pourpose i/o) pins to indicate when serial is being sent and recieved. I wired a pair of very bright leds that I had to them and then tried to pipe the light to the corners using some translucent plastic tubes and hot glue. It looks pretty cool!

  • The $15 Wiring Board

    This was started out as one of my things for Thing-A-Day (2008) (http://www.thing-a-day.com/2008/02/22/day-22-thing-22-the-15-wiring-board/)

    This follows my work getting the wiring software platform working on some generic mega128 boards. It is somehow related to my work on reducing the costs of the Arduino runtime to less than $4

    I recently found the code for an Stk500v2 based bootloader at http://www.avride.com/article/wiring/ for the new wiring platform. I have wanted to run wiring on several of the systems I have using the mega128 and the olimex header board that sparkfun sells. Between sparkfun and Ebay my per board cost is about 11 bucks. With the ftdi ft232rl usb to serial chip at $4 that would make the wiring platform affordable :)

    My initial attempt was using Wiring 0014 which seemed pretty darned broken. It didnt take long for 0015 to come out fortunately. Once I got the bootloader to work with wiring I realized that the wiring platform requires a 32khz clock crystal to be connected to tosc1 and tosc2. On the Olimex boards there is a space for this crystal. On some other boards like the Futulec ET-AVR-stamp this had to be soldered to the legs of the processor.

    Once this was added to the boards things started working. Below you can see the Futurelec ET-AVR-STAMP running my “antisocial” wiring program.

  • Day 25: Thing 25: AntiSocial(ism)

    (Archive of: http://www.thing-a-day2.com/2008/02/25/day-25-thing-25-antisocialism/)

    I went to radio shack about a month ago and bought an utrasonic distance sensor made by parallax called a ping))).

    I have been feeling cranky and anti social lately so I thought I should make something that didnt want to be bothered.


    I am considering adding an air horn for people who dont respect its limits but think that the neighbors might not appreciate it much.