We’ve covered Microchip’s MPLABX IDE over the course of the year, and were very excited to see the news that MPLABX is finally out of beta! MPLABX v1.0 has been released, and is available for download here, along with release notes and the latest copies of the various Microchip compilers.

Among other things, MPLABX offers the following features:

• Java-based, cross platform GUI: Program PICs on Mac, Windows, or Linux
• Refreshed, improved graphical user interface
• (Most of) the same great functionality from MPLAB 8

We are very excited about this project. MPLABX represents the first official cross-platform compiler/IDE (that we’re aware of), and we hope other chip companies follow in their path.

(via Dangerous Prototypes)

Introduction:

Previously, the guys at Farnell gave us some flux pens to try out to help out with our SMD soldering abilities. While the flux pens are no-clean flux, they still leave behind a residue that is visible on the board:

(continue reading…)

Introduction:

Near the beginning of November, the NBitWonder staff was contacted by the community outreach team at Farnell. From their email:

Great site. Loved some of the builds you have put together and
wondered whether you’d be interested in the following to provide
parts for any up and coming builds?

As a key pillar of the electronics blogging community we have
indentified your blog to road test some of our new products we
currently have on sale. If you are interested in this scheme then we
will happily send you products which will be yours to keep, free of
charge in exchange for a review of the item.
As a high service distributor across the world, Farnell strive to
gauge feedback from those within the industry with an online presence
in order to make the necessary improvements to our products to delight
our customer base.

A “key pillar of the electronics blogging community”? Thanks Farnell, we’re flattered by the offer!
(continue reading…)

As you may know, one of the projects in the pipeline here at NBitWonder is a software-defined radio receiver, loosely modeled after Jeri Ellsworth’s receiver published earlier this year.  As of this past weekend, NBW-SDR (as we call the project) is operational!

The video features a live reception of WWV, one of the United States’ atomic clock stations (much more information here).  The station is located near Fort Collins, Colorado, some 2000 miles from the receiver’s location in Virginia.

There is much more work to be done on the software, as you can tell from watching the video.  For instance, only AM reception is implemented right now.  The signal processing functions still need some work, and more appropriate gains should be chosen for the entire signal chain.  Still, it is rewarding and reassuring to see the project working at some level.

Be sure to watch the github repository and the forum for much more information as project development proceeds.

Introduction:

Dangerous Prototypes is a fantastic open hardware community that we at NBitWonder follow closely. One of the most unique, compelling features of Dangerous Prototypes is their free PCB giveaways. They produce a large number of PCBs for their prototypes, and give away the leftovers for people to try building their own versions of the Dangerous Prototypes projects. Some of these are through weekly events, some are to incentivize people to do things for the site (such as coming up with T-shirt designs, etc.), and still others are offered to “dedicated developers”.

I was curious exactly how Dangerous Prototypes determined what a “dedicated developer” was, so I sent them an email (some time ago, now) asking how they implemented this.

The Bus Pirate:

As a result of that email, the nice folks at Dangerous Prototypes sent me a free PCB code to try building my own project. I opted for the Bus Pirate project, as it’s an extremely useful tool that I could get a lot of mileage out of prototyping and developing NBitWonder projects. For those unfamiliar with the Bus Pirate, think of it as a logic emulator — a device that can pretend to be one side of a given interface (USB, I2C, etc. etc.). (continue reading…)