And now, The CleO is here!

fresh from FTDI’s indiegogo project, my CleO arrived last week, but I had to wait until last Friday for the necessary software to be available from the CleOstuff website .

Now it is going, here is a demo using the NerO card as the Arduino-style processor.  The stopwatch is one of the software items that comes with the CleO Arduino libraries. A neat demo of the touch screen. The rear view shoes the NerO fitted with long pin sockets that plug into the CleO device. I need to read up one the CleO commands and arguments to do something interesting with it!

FTDI have set up a CleO forum to get users together and exchange info and queries for Fred Dart and FTDI.

 

The IoT hat for Rasberry Pi Zero with Bluetooth and WiFi builtin!

I have backed another interesting Kickstarter project from RedBear labs – The IoT hat for Raspberry Pi Zero (etc) – http://kck.st/1qlPeFz  It will be good for keeping Pi Zero based devices nice and small and connected…

The picture is from the Kickstarter site and shows how small an addon card can be for a Pi Zero; since there are free (11?) GPIO pins, another hat could be added to do more stuff!

Plus the RedBear folk are looking at selling these devices for USD10 or thereabouts!!

A new (old) Arduino-like card – the Nero

I have just backed a kickstarter project for FTDI’s Nero Arduino uno like card, http://kck.st/1Y22b1f .  FTDI Chip is using Kickstarter to fund an open source reference design for an Arduino UNO compatible board. The NerO is based on the company’s FT231X USB UART, and delivers 5V at 1A without overheating. (from Electronics Weekly.com)

In the past, I used the FTDI devices without any problems, and it is good to see an Arduino compatible with decent current sourcing!

 

 

My Kickstarter MicroView has arrived!

At last, it has arrived!
My MicroView worked ok out of the box; but when loading sketches from Arduino 1.0.5 the device would upload OK, but the program would run briefly and stop, touching the RST pin would start it briefly, then nada.

display folded forward, showing pin joints.

After taking it (the Microview) apart, and checking all the joints, I then tried loading the latest MicroView libraries from GitHub to the Arduino libraries folder, recompiling/reloading the sketches and everything was fine after that.
Kudos to Marcus, JP and co. for getting on top of the bootloader issues that have plagued some early adopters..

Putting things in boxes

I have found that KMart and Bunnings are a good source of plastic boxes with compartments for taming the parts monster!

Already written about back in August 2011, but worth mentioning again…

My Stepper motor tester…

I needed to test some steppers, and the quickest way is to use the Arduino reference sketch and a home made L298 based shield. As you can see from the picture, not very elegant (especially the Heatsink!) but it works quite well. The steppers are for my RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printer ( a work in slow progress…) and are not new, hence the testing.

Arduino done just right = Goldilocks

I have pledged to the Pozible project for a new Arduino inspired product – Goldilocks Project  note: fixed bad link..

After reading about this idea on John Boxall’s blog, tronixstuff , I thought it was an interesting approach to a more powerful AVR solution while keeping the Arduino format and importantly, being able to use existing shields.. Recommended as it is being supported by Freetronics, who make great stuff.

NinjaBlocks

I backed this project on KickStarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ninja/ninja-blocks-connect-your-world-with-the-web/widget/video.html

With the web connection, you could drive them from anywhere in the world..and they look cute!

Repairing and restoring old electronic stuff – Pt 3

The Systron-Donner 100A Pulse Gen. has been fixed as suggested earlier, the output  transistors have been replaced with more modern, faster and higher power devices. It works very well now.

Was working on an old Fluke 8000 DMM – appears to have a damaged special IC, so probably not repairable unless another broken 8000 turns up!

I have a faulty Fluke 1900A counter on the bench now – having another working unit allows testing of socketed special IC’s and the front end ECL module – they all work so the problem is somewhere in the main board TTL/CMOS.

The Tek 2430 is gone (sold on eBay) had obscure problems that were going to take too long to fix – Uni Tri. 1 starts on Monday 20 Feb, and I didn’t have the time/space..

Useful power supply

The man (Geoff Graham) who designed the Maximite PIC based computer project featured recently in Silicon Chip has a web site where he describes some of his other projects. One is a very simple but useful Utility Power Supply.

My only concern is that there is no current limiting, which is vital to avoid damage due to shorts or wrong connections to your protoboard etc.  Implementing this may be worth looking at, without making a neat project too complex.  I have a couple of Arlec transformers that may be suitable if I can live with lower total current.