Slashdot Mirror

What is cheap to you? I would have thought the Imp ($25, incs WiFi) and Beetle ($7-8, no Wifi) would output 100mA per GPIO pin.

You would have thought wrong: the imp module maxes out at 20 mA on its LED pins. I couldn't find an output current spec for the Beetle, but it claims to be a mini Arduino Leonardo, so I wouldn't expect more than the Leonardo's 40 mA per pin.

"What is cheap" is a good question--for those who can live with two chips (the horror!), a $6 TLC5940 will get you 16 channels that drive 120 mA each (just the first chip I found).

RTFA. It's clearly in an SD form factor, or close to it.

This isn't without president. Here's an ARM Cortex M3 with wifi in an SD card form factor that also isn't actually compatible with any SD card readers:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11395

I agree it is weird and confusing though. I guess it avoids the development of a new case, and the technology for packaging chips in SD card cases is mature. Also people know how small they are so you don't have to have photos of them on peoples' fingers and whatnot.

Temp/humidity sensors can't be that expensive on their own,

Boom shaka-laka

and you could monitor and control the whole shebang with an Arduino/Pi combo.

OK so assuming a 4 zone setup, you're looking at $40 for the sensor, let's say another $100 for the Ardiuno/Pi setup, and I'm going to guestimate no more than $25 in wire and other supplies... less than $200 total.

Not too shabby if you have the know-how and time to build and code it.

With arduino and a shield yes
http://jimmieprodgers.com/kits/lolshield
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/683

Is Sparkfun actually cheaper? I had the impression that they were more or less direct clones of the Adafruit product, only sometimes slightly worse. A good example of this is the repurposed old Nokia 84x48 LCD screens. Both Adafruit and Sparkfun sell it for about the same price ($10), but the Adafruit model comes with the necessary level shifter while the Sparkfun one instead lies on the package (saying it is 84x84). When you go to find the code for it, the code all comes from Adafruit. I know which one I would buy when given the choice.

Sparkfun has them for $50. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10138

Apparently you haven't seen Z-Axis tape yet.

The tape in action

I wouldn't imagine it would be that difficult given what some people have been doing with these plus an arduino or Raspberry Pi.

It's good to have an old pre OBD2 car...

I wouldn't imagine it would be that difficult given what some people have been doing with these plus an arduino or Raspberry Pi.

Here's just the RF unit itself. It's designed to be used in a software defined GPS receiver.

There's nothing particularly difficult about the RF or decoding GPS.

You can roll your own using off the shelf components. Though this may add a bit of weight if you use PC hardware, an FPGA, DSP, microcontroller or combination may be able to do fast real time positioning past the measly few Hz that vendor GPS modules offer.

First you need a receiver for the GPS signals:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10981

Then you need to process that data into a useful position:
http://gnss-sdr.org/documentation/sige-gn3s-sampler-v2-usb-front-end

Honestly, applying munitions restrictions to fast GPS does nothing to stop anyone from building a cruise missile or other GPS guided weapons. All it does is impose silly restrictions that rogue nations, governments or peoples will simply ignore and work around while denying peaceful legitimate uses by ordinary people.

What you're looking for is here: S.H.O.V.E.L.

and it is open-source.

Apparently, the list is a decent sized one, among recent phones. My understanding is that(outside of mathematically-interesting-but-practically-useless SDR setups, which are really cool; but very computationally demanding and cost as much as most smartphones even without a host to do the compute) most GPS or GPS+others modules abstract away virtually all the dirty details and just provide position, heading, and time information(possibly some additional parameters, SNR, that sort of thing, depending on vendor and model), so the amount of OS-level support needed to include GLONASS or Galileo in addition to GPS is fairly low.

Get to a Maker Faire. Several years ago I spent awhile talking with Bre Pettis about his new machine from MakerBot without realizing who he was. Take the kids! Solder your own badge! Learn how to make your own air powered rockets! My kids aren't even into robots think it is a blast. A word of waring... they make you sign a serious waiver for a reason. They expect you to pay attention to your surroundings and not blindly walk into that quadcopter demo. Make sure your kids are not texting as they walk. Look for some of the small booths/tables with guys that brought in their home brewed stuff. They were you not that long ago and would love to talk about hot to get started. The fancy booths are people looking to sell stuff. If your not looking to buy your own laser cutter.... they will let you look and they will be polite but they are looking to sell stuff.
http://makerfaire.com/

If you decide you want to start now and want to learn how things work....

Get this kit for $49:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/193

Follow the tutorials starting here:
http://learn.adafruit.com/lesson-0-getting-started

Soon you will be a master of blinky lights. Think of it as "Hello world" for robotics.

If you think, "HOLY CRAP. I AM MAKING IT REALLY DO THINGS" Then continue. If you went, "HOLY CRAP, I JUST WASTED $50 AND A FEW HOURS OF MY LIFE TO MAKE A STUPID LIGHT BLINK" you might consider some of the more expensive options or re-consider your desire to do this. If you want to continue...

If you have an old printer laying around then rip some motors out of it. In fact anything that has a motor or is older electronics will soon be looked at with, "Hey, that has a nice transformer in it. Those are some nice through hole resisters. Would you look at those hardened steel rods! I wonder why they did it this way?"

Things to consider furthering the addiction:
motor shield with some basic motors
digital multimeter
Soldering iron, do not get one of those nasty Radio Shack $20 pieces of junk. You wouldn't try to build a small deck with a handsaw. This is one of the more expensive pieces you will buy, but it is one of those tools that you will use and will appreciate not having a junk one. This does not mean you need to get a super solder re-work station. Get one with a base station and dial control. Temp controlled would be great.
Go to a nearby electronics place that sells this stuff and buy some general wire, breadboard etc. They will appreciate the business and might be there someday when you really need that one part and don't want to wait for shipping. I was amazed to find one near me. They were rather knowledgeable compared to some certain chains (they had a soldering iron on the counter just in case)
An old computer with the following ports: MIDI(computers used to have a port with real IO, oh my), serial, USB, parallel. You might want to eventually talk to ports and individual pins without the OS in the way. Windows stopped allowing this with XP. A P4 is fast but gets warm and very power hungry. A PIII not so hot or power hungry but not as fast. An old laptop works great for this since it has a small footprint.

Start to follow a few web sites:
http://hackaday.com/
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?main_page=blog
http://blog.makezine.com/
http://dangerousprototypes.com/
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/
http://diydrones.com/
https://www.sparkfun.com/

No, the signals on the headers are TTL level, not 12V needed for RS-232. You need a TTL to Serial adapter or one of the FTDI CDC USB-to-TTL adapter such as this: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9873

http://www.digikey.ca/product-search/en/sensors-transducers/multifunction/1967155?k=inertial

Sparkfun has more variety:

https://www.sparkfun.com/pages/accel_gyro_guide

Kinda nice to have everything in one chip, but for most applications these will do just as well and are available now.

Hi, this one could be for you: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardADK ADK provides the API and on Android side, since 2.3.4 I believe. You can use all of Arduinos features to wire your hardware, you can even do time-critical things on it. But you have to code on both devices. Sparkfun had another interface kit for Android which worked also with older versions: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585 Regards Flo

The missing piece is a USB I/O board that plugs into your phone

IOIO-OTG. It costs more than a Raspberry Pi though.

1. Twine and here
2. Sensors (Motion detection, window and door sensors etc..) that alert via SMS to your phone so you can call police and/or catch them in the act. Perhaps a silent-alarm (no audible alarm). You could obviously add video and images too. Just a linux PC or rasberry pi even that's connected to the net could do it.

A better solution would be to modify the existing PWM code (as the parent poster mentions) to ramp the brightness up instead of blasting it full-on

Wait, if they're already blasting it full on, why are they using PWM at all?

I was going to use a TLC5940 controller for my needs, but that includes gently fading in and out LED's in a software-defined way.

Without the need for fades, the only need for any PWM controller would be to address a great number of LED's independently but cars don't do that (the whole bank turns on and off).

Instead of running ethernet cables, use wifi. There are several options, such as: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822 http://ruggedcircuits.com/html/yellowjacket.html

Start with the Sparkfun Inventor's Kit. I encouraged my coworkers to pick'em up and work through the tutorials, and now they're spending half their time coming up with concepts and building prototypes with stuff they buy from DigiKey.

Seriously, give it a go.

Just pick the best car, and use whatever computer it has in it.

Seriously, there is no BEST.

Arduino has a ton of examples, and a ton of vendors making parts to work with it. Everything else, not so much. I've yet to see any purpose for a Pi. Very limited software support, mostly just Linux fan boys thrilled to run on a cheap computer.

For pure robotic experiments, go LEGO. They even have a newer version coming out mid year that is Linux based. But that is more for learning what to do with working electronics, not how to actually make them.

For electronics tinkering - Sparkfun Arduino https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11236

WS2801

D:

Actually.. if you think that is perverse, you should check out SparkFun Electronics' Cerberus.

It was probably this watch:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11488

Yeah. call me when you have one of those this small...

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10999

I am integrating this stuff into insane tiny things and making a mint. Steampunk people have a buttload of money and when you make something that "works" they will pay any price for it. no other platform has a drop in and go board this small and this cheap that has so many libraries that I don't even have to write a program, most of what I look for is already done.

Anyone can do a monster board... Give me the boards that are so small you could lose them if you sneeze.

For something of a smartphone class, a one-off PCB may cost several hundred dollars. Then the parts will cost another several hundred dollars in small quantities, as well as being difficult to obtain. Now, you have to solder the parts onto the board, which is a decidedly nontrivial thing - and if you decide you want someone else to do this, it's probably another several hundred dollars.

I recently heard of BatchPCB vendor by reading the tutorials on SparkFun's website.

$10 setup fee plus either $2.50 (2 layer) or $4.00 (4 layer) per square inch of PCB board. So a 4.5" by 2.5" PCB would cost between $38 and $55 for the first board, which is a tad less than several hundred dollars. Granted, I do not know much about PCB classifications, so it may not be smartphone class, but I would think DIY open source hardware would not be designed so to an extremely narrow physical layout which could not be done by hand.

I'm not associated with either SparkFun or BatchPCB, I've recently run across them since I started researching how to get a custom PCB for a toy I am designing for my son.

Rather than relying on the 80's BASIC experience, you can actually do better for your kid by buying the SparkFun Inventor's Kit, and helping him through every step of the tutorial. $100.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11022

To program the microcontroller, you can use a cheap, standard netbook, which will also help the kid in school.

Nice find, I'll have to add that link to my collection!

I've been using the dock breakout board to get access to the serial port as well as audio/video outputs and the ability to charge the device.

The serial accessory protocol is well documented, for use with either of these products.

You don't even need a developer account or software on the iPod to do this.

Buy a dock connector breakout board: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8295?

Wire up a micro controller to the serial port. Use it to send Apple Accessory commands: http://www.adriangame.co.uk/ipod-acc-pro.html

No license or developer account needed.

Some other posts have brought up a few good points not in the summary, which if actually needed might require additional hardware, such as to ensure the audio is cut off while using the radio to talk to your controller or whatnot. But some relays controlled by the same micro controller above should be able to handle that.

Nah. I'd forgotten that Simon wasn't square. Sparkfun's DIY version has supplanted my mental image. And indeed, exact same ordering of colors in both.

and lately I've been thinking of using a 3d printer to make new model 500 rotary phones. With bluetooth to talk to your smart phone.

Not exactly as you were thinking, but close: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/287
I bet the bluetooth only version would have a Much better price tag attached though!

I have seen just the M500 handset in bluetooth form: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/8928/?srp=2

Still, not a bad idea, especially so if you got the manufacturing of the phone body itself down cheap. The bluetooth bits n bobs shouldn't add much on their own.

if I want to go into some manner of production and make alot...I can incorperate the atmega directly into my design, and go from a $30 part "development platform" to a $3 part with a few bits of support (crystal, voltage regulator...)

You don't really need either of those. ATmega chips have an internal 16Mhz clock and aren't very fussy about voltage. The only reason you'd need a regulator is if the things you connect to it need a regulated supply.

But yeah, a $3 chip and a piece of perf board are all you need for the production version of your Arduino project. You can even get the chips with less legs and make things really tiny, eg eight pin Arduino.

Which then increases the cost and requires drivers
http://www.phidgets.com/products.php?category=0 As you can see these all cost more than the Pi by it's self.
This is an option http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10585 when the new one is available
People can always use this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812196233 if their are drivers for this.

Do you want Networking?
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9026 It is more expensive than a Pi.
Wifi? Bluetooth? Well USB dongles can add that to the Pi.
Want to do your development on the board without a PC? A Pi with a Keyboard and Monitor will do that.
Want to play Audio? Here is a kit for you.
http://www.adafruit.com/products/94
Want to develop using Python, Ruby, Basic, Smalltalk, Lua, Perl, Lisp Scheme, Erlang, or Haskell? If it is an interpreted language then it may just be a compile away for the Pi.
There are all sorts of options the pi opens up.
The Arduino is great because of the broad support and community. It is early days with the Pi still but the idea of using Smalltalk for an embedded device interests me a lot.

Or something like this happens.

I have one from an old nokia cell phone 12 bit color, and you can get touch screens. Try http://www.sparkfun.com/ they will have what you need.

TFT 3.2" 320*240 With SD Touch Module (Arduino Compatible)
http://www.satistronics.com/tft-32-320240-with-sd-touch-module-arduino-compatible_p2888.html

or

http://www.sparkfun.com/
http://www.goodluckbuy.com/

These should give you some ideas

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8977
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10089
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11075

http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/76

These should give you some ideas

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8977
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10089
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11075

http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/76

These should give you some ideas

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8977
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10089
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11075

http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/76

These should give you some ideas

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8977
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10089
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11075

http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/76

These are all VGA interface, so difficult to drive directly from a microcontroller. You can use one of these as the VGA interface: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10593

Sparkfun has lots of hobbyist-friendly parts, including LCDs: http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/76?sort_by=price_desc

The only thing they're missing from your requirements is an enclosure, but certainly you can hack something together.

http://www.adafruit.com/category/63 http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/76

Check out SparkFun or equivalent. I've also seen some on eBay for as little as $20. http://www.sparkfun.com/categories/147

Why not make your own watch with the Sparkfun Big TIme Watch kit.
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10870

It is an arduino compatible kit that you can program yourself.

Microphones: actually haven't changed their shape, but only the really nice and expensive ones still look like that.
Microphone Examples

Magnifying Glasses: Still quite widely in use, but apparently not so well-known among the Jersey Shore iPhone OMGLolcats crowd as they are among the Bill Nye vs Niel DeGrasse Tyson awesomeness level debaters.
Mag Glass Example

Binoculars: Really? People don't know what these are? They are still the best way to get a stereo 3D view of something at huge distances in a compact device. I have several pair on my shelf right now. People have them at sporting events every time I go.
Binocular Example

Television: My television still has an antenna. After the recent switch from analog to digital, however, it is no longer the rabbit ear dual collapsible one in the icon. It now looks vaguely like some sort of alien ship or horrible instrument of torture with alternating flat fins(and sharp edges...). Not sure it's worth changing the icon, though.
Antenna Example

Wrenches and Gears: Because what happens under the hood of your car is pure magic, and nobody can explain it. Even if young folks don't know what gears actually do, they recognize them from the steampunk jewelry and stuff.
Gears Example

... go to the company, literally add code on a case-by-case basis to log a particular set of user's actions.

If I were running an online service I wouldn't want the FBI coming in and adding their own code to mine. If the FBI wants any of the data on my system then let them either get a subpoena that I can execute with a certain degree of deliberation (see here for one example), or a search warrant that allows them access to all of the data named therein. No need for the FBI to install special code that is potentially just as dangerous as a backdoor.