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:

It would be great if the residue could be removed, for purposes of aesthetics and presentation. Fortunately, team Farnell came through for that as well.

Flux Remover:

The staff at Farnell sent along a can of flux remover aerosol for us to try.

Flux remover, as the name suggests, is used to remove flux. Using it is as simple as point and spray (it is highly recommended to do this over a trash can). The flux remover also functions as a general purpose cleaner, removing flux, residue, any lingering solids, etc.

All told, we were quite happy with the flux remover. It’s valuable for removing excess flux from your circuit boards and making them look more professional. If you want to try it yourself, go pick up a can or two here.

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!

Field Testing:

So what to field test? We were given free reign to pick anything from Newark that we wanted (within reasonable cost limits, of course). We didn’t like the idea of getting some arbitrary item from them for the purposes of reviewing it, so we decided to look for tools we had legitimate uses for. At the time of this writing, NBitWonder’s projects use almost exclusively SMD components, and assembling prototypes can sometimes be a challenge, especially with small pin pitches. For this reason, we went ahead and ordered a number of flux pens from Newark, specifically this model.

About the Flux Pen:

Flux is used to help solder flow in electrical circuits, and is especially useful in SMD circuit manufacturing. A flux pen, as it sounds, is a pen-like device which contains flux. As you work your way down in package size and pin pitch, a flux pen becomes more and more useful. By the time you reach some of the high pin count QFP and QFN packages, we would daresay a flux pen becomes a necessary tool for the electronics hobbyist.

We chose the Kester 83 primarily because it’s no-clean flux and ROHS compliant, but especially because, of all the flux pens, it was the cheapest (who doesn’t like cheap, right?)

Using the flux pen:

Using a flux pen is much like using a screwdriver, you just push it to the board and do it. For those who need more formal instruction, you depress the pen tip and wipe it across the surface you wish to apply flux to.

The flux pens worked quite well, and a picture of a soldered QFP64 IC from VoIP32v3.0 is shown below. Notice the residue that can be seen around the chip where flux has dried.

Conclusion:

The flux pens worked very well, easing the task of soldering fine pitch ICs. I recommend them to the advanced electronics hobbyists, as they make those small, frustrating parts much easier to solder. So go grab your own, and write about your experiences below!

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.).

Currently, there’s a “stable” v3.5 release of the Bus Pirate:

and there’s an in-development v4.x Bus Pirate hardware:

Hmmmm… version 3.5 it is!

Getting the Parts:

A week or two later, I got an envelope at my doorstep containing the Bus Pirate PCB (from the Netherlands? I was of the impression the DP team was based out of Iowa…)

I opened it and found a nice, shiny Bus Pirate v3.5 PCB:

Now that I had that, it was time to source the Bus Pirate parts. This process was actually made extremely easy for me, thanks in large part to Dangerous Prototypes sharing a populated shopping cart at Mouser. This is a fantastic idea, and makes it very easy for customers to build your product as a kit. All told, the cost of the Bus Pirate parts and the Bus Pirate probe kit from Seeed Studio came to roughly $25 – not bad for what looks to be a very useful tool.

Building the Bus Pirate:

A number of weeks later, the last of the Bus Pirate parts had arrived (with the exception of the properly shrouded male header, which had not been included in the shopping cart at the time and which I had overlooked). Given the parts list for the Bus Pirate, assembly was fairly straightforward. Sure there are SSOP chips onboard, but this is nothing myself and the NBitWonder crew haven’t handled many times before. There was some confusion as to the proper orientation of the LEDs, but aside from that assembly took just over an hour. A finished shot of the Bus Pirate, with associated ribbon cable, can be seen below:

Once built, it’s time to program and start using your Bus Pirate. There’s a plethora of fantastic tutorials on how to do this already available, so head over to the project page and have a look for yourself.

Happy Thanksgiving from the folks at NBitWonder! Have fun, celebrate with family, enjoy yourselves. We’ll be here when you get back

We’ve covered progress on the Eagle/Sketchup plugin EagleUp before, and it looks like v4.3 is ready for use. Via EagleUp:

After more than 3000 downloads, it’s time to improve eagleUp and add to new features.

• fixed curved board outlines (see below the note on outline curves)
• eagleUp now supports 1:1 scaling as well
• eagleUp also includes functions for scaling and measuring the final circuit
• automatic resizing of models during import, you can mix scale indifferently 1:1 and 1000:1 objects
• add support for sub folder ! keep your work folder clean, all eup, png, log files can be placed in a user defined sub folder. Check the settings window.
• add an option for simplified vias (no drill) for faster import of large models.
• add a board thickness unit selection, you can enter 1.6mm as well as 60 mils
• add a log file of the missing parts during the import in Sketchup, the log file is saved next to the eup file
• add support for an attribute-defined part name (see below)
• add possibility of minor modifications of the part (rotation, board side) directly from the Board
• added option to create top and bottom images as jpg files (necessary for some renderers, do not use otherwise)
• Eagle installation < 5.9 (including 4.xx) should use a simplified legacy exporter available here. It keeps most of the features of the full version.
• new PCB colors available, like a white solder mask (Winter is coming !)

The download page for EagleUp v4.3 is available here. In addition, installation and tutorial pages are available. What are your thoughts on the new version of EagleUp? Write your experiences in the comments below.

Over the course of the past year, NBitWonder has been undergoing an effort to improve the way in which we document and share projects.

It started almost a year ago with our initial documentation post. From there, we moved forward, releasing a set of Open Documentation templates, written in LaTeX, and available in our github repository. Those were used for quite some time, and provided a nice, standardized layout for all NBitWonder projects.

Further Refinements:

As nice as writing project documentation in LaTeX is, however, it suffers from a steep learning curve, and can be quite challenge to coerce into providing a particular desired output. Writing project documentation in LaTeX is somewhat akin to writing a dynamic website in notepad; it can be done, but arguably better (or at least more productive) methods exist for creating the desired end product.

With that in mind, we set out searching for a more powerful software package to write documentation in. The stipulations were that the software had to be open source (free as in speech and free as in beer), cross-platform, and easy to use, allowing many end users to adopt our work in their own hobbyist projects and allowing our work to be easily accessible for everyone. After review of the narrow list of softwares available that met these requirements, we settled on OpenOffice.org. The NBitWonder open documentation system, written in OpenOffice.org (OOo) is available here, and all existing NBitWonder projects at the time of this writing have been converted to use this new OpenOffice documentation.

OpenOffice: Pros and Cons

There are a number of advantages to using OpenOffice, as detailed below:

• Powerful User Interface:OpenOffice is an office suite, rather than a typesetting program. As such, it has a vastly more intuitive graphical user interface than LaTeX, and documentation output can be seen live without requiring compilation.
• Extension Support:As of version 3.0, OpenOffice.org supports the writing and development of extensions and macros written in a number of programming languages (python 2.6.1, in particular). As such, documentation improvements for the Open Documentation system can be developed and distributed in the form of OpenOffice extensions. This is a marked improvement over LaTeX, which doesn’t (in our experience with it) provide a particularly interface for user macros, as well as a considerable improvement over packages such as Microsoft Office, in which macros are only supported in various flavors of Basic.
• Open Source and Cross-Platform:OpenOffice is well known and truly cross-platform, including a Linux version, which is less than can be said for Microsoft Office or many other open source office programs.

Of course, with all of these advantages, there are a handful of disadvantages as well:

• Support for Developers: OpenOffice started out as the proprietary software package StarOffice, which was then purchased by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun Microsystems was later acquired by Oracle. Recently, however, Oracle parted ways with OpenOffice, setting it adrift without major corporate support for the system or funding for the top level developers. In spite of this, the OpenOffice project has been picked up by the Apache Foundation and is currently being hosted and supported there, and future stability of the project remains strong.
• Advanced Typesetting Capabilities: When it comes to formatting sophisticated mathematical equations in beautiful textbook style, LaTeX is the unquestioned king. Support for formulas in OpenOffice is there, though not nearly as good as LaTeX-based documentation. This is a secondary concern, however, and it is our belief that the advantages of OpenOffice over LaTeX outweigh this small disadvantage.

More work on NBitWonder’s documentation and software tools will be made available soon, but for the time being, feel free to try out our latest efforts by grabbing the Open Documentation System from our github repository.

Recently, the first issue of Open Hardware Journal was published, to the largely unheralded glory that it deserves. It features many interesting articles, but in particular, features a fantastic article written by Christopher Olah on the 3D printing of optical elements, specifically lenses.

I was unable to find photos used in his paper online, but an email to Chris and he generously sent the images my way, under a Creative Commons Attribution license (thanks Chris!). Those photos have been added to NBitWonder’s flickr account for all to access, and attributed/licensed accordingly.

To say that the optics produced were truly 3D printed is something of a misnomer, as optics demands a level of precision unavailable by current generation desktop 3D printers. However, through an ingenious use of plastic wrap, Chris was able to produce a fairly high quality lens model. A mold was then created and used to cast a resin lens. While not perfect, the results obtained using this DIY method were truly extraordinary (pictures below):

3D printable optics offers an exciting new realm of possibilities for makers everywhere, in terms of making decent quality optics cheap and readily available to all. This article appears in the first edition of the Open Hardware Journal, so go grab a copy (it’s free) and read about this and other fascinating stories. For additional reading, see Chris’s wordpress blog.

Exciting news from Cadsoft today as they open Eagle v6 for beta testing. Eagle v6 is slated for release in early 2012, but in the meantime users can try the beta software. Via Makeafruit:

CadSoft invites EAGLE users to participate in testing new versions of the EAGLE Layout Editor.

We suggest that only users who already have experience with previous versions of EAGLE participate in the beta test. If you are new to EAGLE please use our current release version.

There are some limitations, however:

IMPORTANT NOTE: This beta version of EAGLE is NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE! Do not use it in any critical project, and only work with copies of your existing data files! Do not send board files created with this beta version of EAGLE to a board house – they may not yet be able to process the new EAGLE data files.
Any files written with this beta version of EAGLE will not be loadable with previous program versions!

Apparently, there are a few issues with having the beta run as freeware on OSX/Linux. To get around this, users have had luck copying “../EAGLE/bin/freeware.key” to “../EAGLE/bin/EAGLE.key”. So download the beta, give it a try, and let us know how it goes for you!