Dangerous Prototypes: Open Source Hardware Seeding

MojoKid writes "Dangerous Prototypes is a two-year old organization with the stated mission of producing 'one new open source project every month.' In its nearly two years of existence, DP has created about 30 projects, such as the Flash Destroyer, which tests the limits of solid state storage by writing and verifying a common EEPROM chip, rated for 1 million writes, until it burns out. The projects themselves are being sold by another interesting company, Seeed Studio. Seeed is a contract manufacturing/sales channel for hire. It helps hardware designers get their ideas manufactured in China and sold worldwide with a service called Propagate for manufacturing small quantities (100+) of open source hardware."

Comments

Really, Flash Destroyer the best example?

[thegarbz]

Dangerous Prototypes doesn't just produce shitty projects for the purpose of proving something that can be found on any flash manufacturer's datasheet. They make plenty of very useful projects too. Not just useful for an end user, but useful for the hardware tinkerer. There two most famous projects by a long shot are the Bus Pirate and the Logic Sniffer

The bus pirate is a small device that connects to the computer via USB and allows you to use a terminal to talk all sorts of weird and wonderful protocols like SPI, 1-wire, I2C, or UART. Great for debugging a design, or reverse engineering. It is also capable of sniffing out the commands on a bus.

The Logic Sniffer is a cheap 16 channel Logic Analyser, which while no where near as good as a commercial unit comes in at 1/100th of the cost as well.

Both are fantastic tools for anyone hacking away at microcontrollers and both have saved me lots of headaches at some point. The best example was when the Logic Sniffer was released with firmware that wasn't very upgrade friendly to say the least, I used the Bus Pirate to flash new firmware to the Logic Sniffer.

They also make a JTAG programmer / debugger, a Infrared I/O board for a computer, and a fully functional tiny Web Server. They are much more useful than the summary makes them out to be.

Re:Really, Flash Destroyer the best example?

[tftp]

Logic analyzers are collecting dust now, for many reasons. Originally they were envisioned to capture the complete state of a complex logical circuit, and perhaps they were useful at that time. But that time was about 20 years ago.

Today all the hardware that logic analyzers attempted to debug is located on the MCU die. You don't have access to it, and generally you don't have to - the manufacturer of the MCU did that already, and the peripheral is likely to work (modulo the errata.)

If you are building a full size clone of IBM/370 then you can benefit from the device. But if you are doing it in an FPGA then Xilinx already has a logic analyzer there, called ChipScope. It's an IP core, so you can remove it when you are done debugging.

What you really need today is a half-decent digital scope, with at least 1 GS/s (better 4.) You don't need lots of channels - one is enough, two is plenty. If you need four you probably don't know what you are doing. Note: the trigger channel is also a channel, it's there for a purpose.

You can debug nearly all the amateur level hardware with just a scope. More test equipment is needed if you are into RF. The problem, as you point out, is that cheap equipment is often a waste of time and money. If you have to, go out and rent a decent instrument, it's not that expensive on a daily basis. You don't want to fight the test equipment that is too slow for your signals - you won't see a thing anyway, and the joy of owning a piece of junk is not worth contemplating :-)

Re:Really, Flash Destroyer the best example?

[ajlitt]

Knowing the limitations of your tools is important whether they're $50 or $50000. I use my DP Bus Pirate every so often at work for programming the odd flash device or simulating an I2C master to debug I2C slave code on a microcontroller. I have a "professional" I2C/SPI pod that the company purchased that can't do many of the things this $30 board can.

Re:Can you say... "I'm a douche" any more clearly?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you knew anything, you'd know that none of these projects have been abandoned. Some are so useful and popular (like the Bus Pirate) so as to be in their 5th update. More than a few more-traditional electrhobbiest retailers carry one or more DP "products".

While the OP did a miserable job conveying what DP does (and picking what I'd consider their least useful/interesting product to highlight), your proud and tenacious grasp of ignorance dwarfs the lameness of the OP. Had I not been so familiar with DP and SeeedStudio beforehand, I probably would have emitted a "WTF?!?" when I first saw this thread, as some of the other less-smegtastic responders have

DP is probably the best example I know of small-scale cooperative distributed engineering in the hobbyist space. While Adafruit and SparkFun certainly dwarf DP in terms of sales and recognition, DP is an order of magnitude more tightly involved with their target audience in the definition and execution of their projects, and have a much higher ratio of work done by their customers than they do themselves. To date their "customers" are just as involved as the greater Arduino, and now Kinect, communities.

DP and Seeedstudio

[cr0nj0b]

I have a few of DPs products. The webplatform is cheaper and more useful to me than an arduino/ethernet shield or even the new EthernetPro http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10536

Seeedstudio's fusion service is good price wise, but I will not have PCBs made through them again. Too many bad traces. Pads lift if you try to re-work them.

Slightly more expensive, http://dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/pcb_order , but I have never had a bad board and the quality is much much better.

-JC