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Seeed Grove: http://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Gr...

Sparkfun Qwiic: https://www.sparkfun.com/qwiic

But it honestly looks a lot like Wemos shields, except as castellated PCBs. Which I think has potential for nice low-profile projects. Main problem is that we only need so many temperature sensors.

I think the real killer is how often they'll end up needing to add a microcontroller or something to force a component into an i2c mold.

Maybe they have been replaced by USB dongles. But the command set is the same:

https://www.developershome.com...
https://www.sierrawireless.com...
https://www.sparkfun.com/datas...

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Adafruit and Sparkfun are two companies that design and sell electronics components for makers, hardware hackers, and developers. Want to tinker with an arduino and some servos? Need a breakout board for some tiny surface-mount component? Want to augment your clothes with LEDs and sensors? Heard about this Raspberry Pi thing, but don't know the first thing about Linux? These the places to go not only for the easy-to-connect hardware, but also a large amount of information to help you figure it out.

Both companies are committed to open hardware - publishing their designs for all to see and understand. They often publish software libraries for this or that component, too. Most every kit they publish has an introductory video or tutorial to go along with it. Both companies are based in the U.S. ( lot of Adafruit's boards are fabricated and populated at their NYC headquarters.)

Yes they do. That's why products such as these exists.

Thanks to open-source hardware, there has never been so much choice and so much opportunity to learn.

My recommendations for today's tinkerer are:
- Raspberry Pi (not fully open source but close enough) and the wiring Pi library http://wiringpi.com/
- The esp8266 boards: Super cheap Arduino compatible WIFI boards.
- Any SAMD21 ARM cortex M0 board like the Arduino Zero, Sparkfun SAMD21 breakout, or the Adafruit Feather M0.
- STM32 "blue pill" boards. Super cheap on ebay and powerfull.

In theory, you don't need hardware to be open source just to "tinker" with it. But in reality, if you want to truly learn stuff, open source hardware is great. You can take a look at the schematics, learn piece by piece from others: power supply circuits, reset, oscillators, micro-controllers, ...

For example take a look at the Sparkfun SAMD21 breakout schematics here: https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datas...
You'll see the leds, the usb, the battery power circuit, the micro-controller and headers, all nicely broken down in separate blocks that you can learn from and re-use.

After a while, you will be able to make your own boards. YES! ** That the best part of it all! **

Myself I started with a simple Arduino UNO and a couple of years later, I'm about to launch my own IoT Arduino compatible platform, fully designed and implemented in the garage of our house: http://omzlo.com/
   

I got an email earlier this week that SparkFun started selling the MicroPython pyboard (no headers or with headers), running an optimized version of Python 3.4. Looks interesting. This one is on my wish list.

I got an email earlier this week that SparkFun started selling the MicroPython pyboard (no headers or with headers), running an optimized version of Python 3.4. Looks interesting. This one is on my wish list.

Here is an already commercialized project if you'd like to avoid the Kickstarter scam which has the same form factor as this project

http://freematics.com/store/in...

Or you know, the hundreds of people that thought about this before and documented it.
https://www.google.com/search?...
-or-
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tut...

I should start a Kickstarter myself to develop some knock-offs.

Buying an Arduino Pro mini in Canada:

eBay: 2.48$CAD with no shipping or import costs, estimated delivery within 12-36 business days. Total: 2.48$CAD.

Sparkfun: 9.95$USD (~13.06$CAD) with International Economy shipping of 3.45$USD (4.53$CAD), average delivery 2-4 weeks, may take up to 6 weeks. Total 17.59$CAD if I'm not hit with import fees.

I can get SEVEN Arduino Pro mini from eBay for the cost of a single one from Sparkfun, and the shipping delay is more or less the same in both cases.

I'm all for supporting the little guys but that kind of price difference is way too much.

The only thing fancy about the Nest was its case. The electronics were from like 2000s and never updated (https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/nest-thermostat-teardown-), it never bothered to research any other types of semiconductors besides thermometers, and the software didn't have that many features. I think Google was considering being a hardware company like Apple or Oracle for awhile but drifted back into the mass advertising/spying business. Google's profit margin on the Nest was probably somewhere around $150 per unit. Highway robbery for that electronic turd.

https://www.sparkfun.com/produ...

Here's a bunch of different ones you can build. If it was me I'd just get a Raspberry Pi with a screen as that would be easiest.

Raspberry Pi Based:

  Pong Clock, GPIO Clock, another one, AlarmPi, some more examples

Arduino Based:
type 1 type 2

expert mode,another one, ye olde tux style

How about just using a simple 5V power regulator? Ground on 0v on both cables vin on 12v from poe and vout on 5v usb. Just add a dissipador if you guna use it on high load. https://www.sparkfun.com/produ...

Anyone got a link to a known reliable vendor to buy these?

Not sure what you were searching for but Sparkfun was my number 2 google result for ESP8266. Adafruit is in the top 10 results as well

https://www.sparkfun.com/produ...
https://www.adafruit.com/produ...

I'm guessing the $3 price is in volume (10k or 100k+). There are a number of eBay listings under $3, but I wouldn't rely on eBay as a steady supply stream or for good documentation and support.

My preferred hobby vendors (because they've been supportive to me over the years; I'm not affiliated with them) are SparkFun and AdaFruit. SparkFun has them for $6.95, while AdaFruit has a hacker-friendly version for $9.95 and a surface-mount version for $6.95.

Any idiot can post ridiculous bullshit masquerading as authority on the Internet.

There's even a datasheet for useless things.

No the voltages are inverted

https://www.sparkfun.com/tutor...

We're going to need bigger magic blue smoke refilling kits.

It's called Chip On Board and it is slightly cheaper and better performing than using a packaged IC.

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tut...

Sometimes you can replace them with packaged equivalents during repair.

-R C

There are plenty of single-chip solutions that incorporate a micro, radio, and sufficient flash+RAM to implement an entire wireless sensor. Look at the ESP8266 for example, which is becoming very popular in makerspaces. https://www.sparkfun.com/produ... - you can easily source a complete module for under $5 at retail. Note that the external chip is the application code, which gets loaded into on-chip SRAM at boot time. It's unclear how much RAM is in it; definitely not megabytes, though. The chip has a 64K factory-programmed ROM with basic UART-to-WiFi functionality, but it can also boot a user application off external SPI flash. This new thing from Google appears to be trying to take the scaled-down code in the Chromecast and scale it down further (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecast+Teardown/16069 - Chromecast has quite a bit of memory in it).

For comparison, here is a typical microcontroller with a few kilobytes of RAM. No wonder the Nest is so expensive.....it's vastly overpowered for what it does.

If your time is expensive and you will only be running a very small number of PCBs, consider using ExpressPCB's design tool, because it's easy to learn and it seamlessly connects to their board printing service. (Their service is expensive though, so this is only good if you're doing a few boards, and thus the labor you save will not be eaten up by the extra you pay per board.)

Your perception of size on screen is very different to real life. Print a paper dummy of your board. Try to avoid components with pins any denser than SOIC or 0805.

Consider putting a bridge rectifier just after your DC IN connector. Then the polarity of incoming power doesn't matter: the bridge rectifier sorts it out. (It costs you a small voltage drop, of course.) Or use a connector that's hard to get backwards, such as USB or USB micro.

Tie the RESET pin to Vcc via a resistor. A floating RESET pin may lead to random resets. (I made a PIC board that reset when you brought your hand near it.)

Make sure you put the crystal close to the CPU, and connect to it via short traces. Same with the two capacitors either side of the crystal.

Your first draft will contain errors. Expect to have to trouble-shoot these.

Tie any unused digital lines to places where you can populate LEDs for troubleshooting and diagnostic info.

You'll need to include the six-pin programmer header: your CPUs will arrive blank, without the Arduino bootloader.

When you receive your first blank board, first populate the bare minimum components needed to make the CPU run. Then connect to it from the Arduino software on your PC and burn the bootloader into it. (You'll need a programme.r) (If you've never burned a bootloader, re-burn the boot loader on your actual Arduino to make sure you have all the steps and setup correct.) Only once your CPU is running should you populate further components. This particularly applies if you're using the MOSI, MISO or SCK pins: once you connect these to other chips on your board (e.g. you're using them for SPI), you may be unable to burn the bootloader.

Considering that there exist cheap ICs that handle analog video overlays that really only need a serial input...yes, your 8088 could at least render the overlay with less than $100 of extra hardware.
As for the video on CGA...I guess that's possible too.

Local Motors is an investment of Bre Petis, of Makerbot fame, as noted on his web page.

I don't know if it is deliberate viral marketing strategy of his or just good investment instinct, but I have noticed that products which make headlines on tech sites trace back to his investments. Another example is the new LIDAR offered at SparkFun from PulsedLight, which, according to this YouTube video, is linked to DragonInnovation.com, another Petis investment.

Poor form, but here are some examples.

Why not? They have USB ports.

Correct - though that's only one option. You can also plug it into other boards (termed 'bricks', so Arduino has Shields, BeagleBone as Capes, and Edison has Bricks). SparkFun - next to Adafruit probably the best-known company for this sort of thing - has got a bunch of bricks plus the Edison available for pre-order starting today:
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/...
https://www.sparkfun.com/categ...

Among those is the standard Arduino form factor breakout out of Intel itself, but also a brick for an Arduino Pro Mini form factor, and a bunch of more generic bricks like accelerometer/gyro, GPIO, (tiny) display.

I do wonder why there doesn't appear to be a sound brick.. seems like an oversight especially when they've got everything else required to make a tiny little portable gaming unit.

Correct - though that's only one option. You can also plug it into other boards (termed 'bricks', so Arduino has Shields, BeagleBone as Capes, and Edison has Bricks). SparkFun - next to Adafruit probably the best-known company for this sort of thing - has got a bunch of bricks plus the Edison available for pre-order starting today:
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/...
https://www.sparkfun.com/categ...

Among those is the standard Arduino form factor breakout out of Intel itself, but also a brick for an Arduino Pro Mini form factor, and a bunch of more generic bricks like accelerometer/gyro, GPIO, (tiny) display.

I do wonder why there doesn't appear to be a sound brick.. seems like an oversight especially when they've got everything else required to make a tiny little portable gaming unit.

All you need is this little kit.

It shouldn't be that hard given something like this and an adruino or RPi.

I have one right here on my desk. It connects a cheapo (but effective) battery charger to a USB power supply. The charger has an A socket, and it connects to a standard charger via an AA cable.

I keep meaning to superglue it into the charger to prevent someone connecting two of my computers together and something horrible happening.

I heard the phrase "We are making a supply chain for EPMs" near the end of the video (5:33)

What he meant was Electro-Permanent Magnets described here. Which could have been the reason why the phone had problems booting in the video.

listen, Life is NOT a movie, a hacker cant reconfigure the temperature sensor into a "FLIR heat sensor" to give them ANY information other than how hot it is on the ceiling in the hallway where you mounted it. That Passive IR sensor cant be magically turned into an HD IR camera, it's a single specific function sensor that can detect if smoke has entered the chamber, you cant turn it into a spy camera. Then you have a CO sensor that is specifically designed for it's task, again cant be reconfigured as a direction Co2 and other gas sensors to detect if you have been smoking crack in the bathroom again.

the ONLY data that someone can glean from this is local mounted temperature, alarm state and CO2 levels. Nothing else. even if you left for a 4 week vacation in your Paris apartment you cant even hope to get data if the house is unoccupied unless you set the thermostat to very low and it was the dead of winter.

https://www.sparkfun.com/news/... 6 seconds on google turned this up. It even has links to the sensors data sheets.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow... for the ifixit teardown

Please, if you write an article, Know something about the subject, spend DAYS researching it before you publish the information. This is why "bloggers" have zero respect and are mostly ridiculed.

This is one pocket scope for less than $100

This is another.

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

If you happen to know, I noticed in the picture of the sheet of dies that there are a fair number of gaps. Are these failures in the die manufacturing process, or something else?

The 3D printing hype is a little optimistic in ways but there is more to the notion of small scale production than 3D printing. CNC machines are very main stream in industry and the cost is well within the reach of Middle America. The cost of automation is coming down and is much more accessible than it used to be.

I would also like to see a move away from big box stores. It would be nice for a change to be able to walk into a store (camera shop, hardware store, and other more or less specialty stores) and talk to some one that knows what they are talking about.

Fluke did their job well. Now it's up to Sparkfun.

Missing from summery is the Sparkfun webpage https://www.sparkfun.com/news/... sparkfun which claims "SparkFun has officially accepted their offer and will be donating the Fluke multimeters to several educational institutions and schools" if you read the comments Africa would be a good area to start looking for drop off spots.

It's not likely that they requested it specifically. However, they do appear to have come to an agreement with SparkFun: they've posted this update:

Today (March 20, 2014), Fluke reached out to us. Here is what they had to say. SparkFun has officially accepted their offer and will be donating the Fluke multimeters to several educational institutions and schools.

Agreed, this is an attempt to copy Fluke's recent multimeter design.

Apparently Fluke doesn't think so.

Seriously, the layout and color scheme was clearly meant to imitate Fluke. At first, and even second, glance you would assume this was a Fluke till you look closely.

https://cdn.sparkfun.com//asse...
vs
http://www.dhresource.com/albu...

If I look at Fluke's versus SparkFun's, I, as a human, cannot differentiate a difference in the colors. And they both clearly bear an extreme semblance, which is what the trademark is about.

I'm curious, would you be so opposed if Pepsi copied a Coke can, and ever so slightly changed the tint of the red, such that it was "orange" and replaced the text with "Pepsi Cola"?

Actually read the TFA (and the links to the trademark in question) and you can see that:

1. Fluke did not trademark yellow multimeters.

1. The linked document is not the trademark, it is the USPTO's TSDR entry. You can download the actual trademark "Registration Certificate" by clicking on the "Documents" tab and looking for it. When you pull the the registration certificate, there is no disclaimer of color. That's a USPTO data entry error from their conversion to an electronic records system.

So yes, Fluke didn't trademark yellow multimeters. They trademarked dark gray and yellow multimeters with a particular positioning of colors.

If you look at an image of SparkFun's multimeter, there is a striking resemblance.

Exactly. Sparkfun claims that "Our multimeters are actually kind of orange, not Fluke yellow.". Uh huh. Pull the other one.

These were not destined for ebay, they were destined for https://www.sparkfun.com/ which is an outstanding resource for electronics and robotics enthusiasts.

But most Americans born here grew up with more honest set of retailers, more honest wholesalers, reasonably effective enforcement, they have not had this cheap imitation knock off problem. The worst you would see is the Walmart brand (Equate?) of nasal spray next to one made by J&J. If you had never gone home and opened a package of Cynthol bar soap and find inside a foul smelling skin abrading cake of caustic alkali with Sinthol stamped on it, you have not been affected by these knock-offs. So all the power to customs agents to spot the cheap knock-offs and take suo moto action to knock the imitations off the planet.

You can't transmit with an RTL-SDR, it's just a software defined receiver. You can, however, just buy a NRF24L01+ IC and build your own transceiver like you always could.

The novelty here is decoding the transmissions using an RTL-SDR, not in decoding the transmissions in general.

Here you go:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/287

http://content.luxology.com/gallery/565fc4f98dd0a8d41c8f7ab8bf52457d.jpg

https://www.sparkfun.com/news/909

Is this the article?

here's a link to a Sparkfun blog article on the "pit/valley of despair" that small hardware companies face: https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/20

Basically you make a few things by hand for yourself, and your friends, or you go to China and Manufacture (with a capital "M") there's nothing in between the two that's economical, though I do think that's changing with the arrival of cheap pick and place machines (another fallout from the 3D printer revolution)

Wow! When I push on my eye, everything gets blurry.

Oh, wait, you're talking about IC based motion sensors(MEMS). Yea, see this isn't really news. (I know you're shocked.) We've had really tiny, really high quality/sensitivity motion sensors in game controllers, phones, and R/C modeling controllers for years!

they're cheap too! You can get really overpriced ones from for $13 for your own projects.