Seven dollars might buy you a burger at an upscale burger joint, or you can get a complete microcontroller development kit from STMicroelectronics. Most likely now holding the throne of lowest cost complete development kit (previous holder was TI’s $10 EZ430 USB stick?), the $7 STM8S-Discovery includes a detachable programmer, target board, and prototyping board. [...]
The Teensy USB development board from PJRC has been upgraded to a new board featuring Atmel’s newer ATmega32U4 device. With this comes the benefits of the new device, including A/D channels, extra I/O (including PWM and I2C) and more memory. By default it operates at 5v, but it can be converted to operate at 3v3, [...]
The repurposable device featured here is a Digipower Solutions Jumpstart JS1-V3 emergency cell phone charger, which charges and provides power via a pair of male and female mini-A USB connectors. The device is intended to provide additional capacity for phones equipped with a suitable connector. The packaging claims that it will provide an hour of [...]
Here are some photos of the SparkFun AVR Stick, which at $9.95 provides a very inexpensive USB solution, based on the ATtiny85. This board is using a software stack to emulate a USB 1.1 device interface, in particular the V-USB stack (formerly known as AVR-USB) from Objective Development under GPLv2 or under a commercial license. [...]
Inspired by the square wave style output of the SparkFun game, I’ve created a version of the Atari Punk Console synthesizer. This version uses the digital buttons on the Sparkfun simon board instead of potentiometers. The left two buttons control the period/frequency and the right two buttons control the pulse length.
Features:
- 50Hz to 20kHz frequency [...]
Here’s a new app for the SparkFun simon game platform, simon drum machine. This is a very minimalistic drum machine, based loosely on the original SparkFun example code. It works by sequencing through each light at approx. 120 beats per minute. At powerup the lights are sequencing, but each beat plays no notes. Pressing the [...]
Here’s my updated version of the SparkFun Simon v21 source code. Main improvements are:
- Code: code cleanups, more functions and comments
- Build: easily selectable between board revisions (6-25-08 and 4-9-2009 supported, but only the 6-25-08 has been tested.)
- Usability: buttons held down too long are no longer registered as two button presses.
- Code: Simplified psuedo-random [...]
At this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire, the SparkFun booth was host to soldering classes, where aspiring Makers could learn soldering by assembling kits for functional devices. SparkFun donated the kits and asked for a small donation that went to local charities. The SparkFun blog mentions that they raised $4970, way to go SparkFun! There [...]
Received the AVRopendous2-DIP from Opendous, Inc. today, and as promised, here are some pictures of the board. For now I’ve just plugged it in and tested the pre-programmed Keyboard Test demo, which displays the pin name when you ground a pin. It’s always nice to have a way to verify a development board is working [...]
One product very similar to the Teensy USB development board are the open-source (hardware and software) avropendous boards, which now seem to be available in a DIP form factor ala the Teensy board, at a similarly low price. The AVRopendous-DIP ($22) uses the same AT90USB162 as the Teensy board, and allows selecting 5v or 3v3 [...]