News

We've just rolled out a whole new range of tiny functional modules to make it really easy to expand your projects. First came the AM3X 3-Axis Accelerometer Module, and now the LIGHT Light Sensor Module has also landed. This module is amazingly small:

Well, it may not look small when it's blown up so large, but keep in mind that the connection headers are on 0.1" centers! The whole board is about the size of a fingernail. The TEMT6000 sensor is a very reliable and consistent device, unlike a typical light-dependent resistor (LDR) that can vary with temperature and between different units. The TEMT6000 comes pre-calibrated so if you put a bunch of them in the same lighting conditions, you'll get the same value coming out of all of them. Brilliant.

To see how easy it is to use with an Arduino, check out the Light Sensor Module Quickstart Guide.

Freetronics founder Marc Alexander was one of the judges on the Open 7400 Logic Competition recently, and we also provided a prize pack to go out to one of the winners.

The recipient of our prize pack was Luc Small, for his "(Wheely) Bin Night Reminder" project. Nice one, Luc!

Luc blogged about his win, and we're very interested to see what things he comes up with using the EtherTen, LCD & Keypad Shield, and Terminal Shield he received in his prize pack.

Simon Monk has posted a great little introductory guide to using our USBDroid with Philip Lindsay's "Handbag" software development toolkit to create your own Android accessories with just a few lines of code. In this video he shows an interface running on an Android mobile phone communicating with a USBDroid to drive servos when buttons are pressed on the touchscreen:

Brilliant! Check out his guide here:

Handbag - Android and Arduino without the Java

The recently launched Freetronics Forum has a category specifically to give people a chance to showcase their projects, either complete or in progress. Marc and I love seeing the things people build so we're partly doing this for selfish reasons: we ship a lot of devices out but don't often see the end result of the projects they go into, so this is a way for us to get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing they're being put to good use.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a new menu item appear near the top right of our site this morning when the Freetronics forum went live. Those with particularly sharp eyes may even notice that the first posts appeared in the forum yesterday - before we'd even linked to it! Last night while Marc and I were at the Melbourne Hackerspace we gave a couple of people a sneak peek, and once word got out the forum came to life before our eyes.

Our plan is for the forum to fulfill three main purposes.

First, we want it to be a convenient place to get support for Freetronics devices, both from Freetronics and also from the many talented members of the Arduino / Open Hardware community. We often find that we answer the same questions over and over again via email - which of course we don't mind doing, but unfortunately it means the answers we give to one person don't benefit anyone else. Covering support questions in a more public way will help all our customers by providing ready-made answers right where Google can find them.

Second, we hope that the forum is a place where Makers everywhere (but particularly Aussies and our cousins from over the Tasman Sea) can chat about whatever they happen to be working on. We've put in categories for 3D printing, random chit-chat, and a project showcase, but that's just to get the ball rolling. If there are other areas of interest that you think deserve their own dedicated category just let us know.

Finally, it's an opportunity for us to get to know you, and vice versa. We've met so many cool people through the Melbourne Hackerspace and events such as linux.conf.au and OSDC, and we love to hear about what people are working on. Freetronics isn't just a faceless company providing products for the market to consume: we're hackers / Makers ourselves, and we started doing this because it's what we love. Having an opportunity to meet people and be inspired by what their imaginations give birth to is what makes this all worthwhile.

So, come along to the Freetronics forum and say hi!

I'm sure that being able to order in US$ is much easier for our American customers, too, so make sure you check out EpicTinker. They even offer live chat and a US-based customer service phone number.

There are only a finite number of I/O pins available on Arduino boards, and sometimes the pins used on a shield conflict with other shields or even the Arduino board itself. In the case of the USBDroid, digital pins D9 through D13 are used for the onboard USB-host functionality that allows it to operate as a peripheral for an Android device such as a tablet or phone. However, the LCD & Keypad Shield also wants to use D9 so if you plug them together you need to reassign one of the pins to avoid a conflict.

It's really not hard once you know what needs to be done, and we've explained the options in a new tutorial:

Combining the LCD & Keypad Shield and the USBDroid

From the announcement on the LCA site:

"Genetic engineering at home? Teaching science on a low budget? Fully open mobile and wireless devices? The design and manufacture of development tools? Is it possible?

Yes.

Join open source luminary Bruce Perens as he explores the Second Revolution of Open Source - Open Hardware.

Open Hardware is a movement dedicated to creating physical objects under the same terms and principles as Open Source Software. That is, their design and manufacture yields freedoms such as the ability to run the hardware for any purpose, study it, change it and share it with others."

LCA2012 will have a big Open Hardware focus, starting with the Arduino Miniconf (organised by Andy Gelme and myself) on the very first day. There are also a number of Open Hardware talks in the main conference, and having Bruce deliver a keynote on the subject just goes to show that it's arrived in a big way. So if you can make it along to LCA, make sure you register soon to take advantage of the Early Bird discount:

http://www.linux.conf.au/

It's taken longer than we would have liked, but the EtherMega has finally made the leap from bits to atoms!

It's got "the lot": everything we could cram into the most versatile board possible. It has the Mega 2560 microcontroller with lots of code space, ram and I/O; on board Ethernet; micro SD card slot; USB; and a switchmode power supply.

Some things of note:

PCB Colour. The picture above shows a design-validation sample so the PCB colours aren't correct: the production units will be in the usual Freetronics colours with yellow markings.

Power supply. The reason for the big delay in getting to this point has been swapping out the linear reg for a switchmode supply. You'd think it would be simple, but no, it turned out to have all sorts of side-effects! The supply we've used is rated up to 28V input, which means you can connect it to any handy power supply in the 7-28Vdc range and it'll just work without causing overheating problems. Current model boards with a linear regulator and an Ethernet shield run a tight-rope between getting enough power to run the Ethernet chip (which requires a good, solid 5V) and overheating the reg. Because I tend to mount Arduinos in odd places (inside walls, etc) it's important to me to have a board that runs cold, so I was determined to go with the switchmode supply even though it caused delays.

Power source selection. Near the upper left of the board you'll see a 3-way male header with a jumper fitted. That's to select the power source between USB and DC IN. Yes, we dropped the power auto-select for this one, in favour of a reliable high current power selection jumper. One of the big complications with the switchmode supply is that the chip can't handle a back-voltage being applied to its output, so with the traditional supply auto-switching circuit the chip gets fried the moment you plug in USB power. Oops. In the end a simple jumper was the most robust solution. We looked at switches to use instead, and found that tiny switches able to fit on the board just aren't rated to the 300mA+ that would be required. In fact most of the tiny surface-mount switches you see are only rated to about 200-300mA maximum! So, a jumper it is.

Soooo close. The first batch of production units will begin any day now.

Director / cinematographer Karl von Moller has been working on a little pet project for a while: a documentary on the evolution of the electronics industry in Australia. It's titled "State of Electronics", and he's spent the last 12 months travelling around Australia interviewing some of the most influential people in the industry. A couple of weeks ago he mentioned that he now has 120 hours of footage! The big job now is trimming it down to just a couple of hours.

To give a bit of insight into the project, Karl has released a sneak peek called "Roll Call". It's not part of the actual doco, more of a "behind the scenes" extra feature to highlight some of the people interviewed so far. It has some amazing names on there, and I even managed to sneak in among all the big wigs: you'll see me briefly in the video below, although Karl decided to give me a promotion and call me the Freetronics CEO! Marc and I don't have titles yet.

In my section of the video you'll see me working at my kitchen table assembling something under the microscope. I can't really tell from the video, but I think it was a ProtoShield or maybe an early-model 433MHz Receiver Shield. No, we don't assemble stuff by hand that way anymore, all our products are put together by high-speed pick-and-place machines, but we still do some prototyping and personal projects by hand. I assembled the first few hundred ProtoShields and Receiver Shields in that oven over the space of a couple of months, but now they come off the production line by the thousand within a matter of hours.

So, to whet your appetite for the full doco:

Roll Call - State of Electronics from karl von moller on Vimeo.