September 20, 2010
Every now and then I come across something that hits just the right combination of silliness and coolness. This project from Western Australian hackerspace "Artifactory" is one of them! They've combined a bunch of Jacob's ladders, a MIDI keyboard, and a Freetronics TwentyTen to create a real "mad scientist" musical instrument. Check out the video to see the result.
More details at http://wiki.artifactory.org.au/doku.php?id=projects:musicalcoildriver
September 17, 2010
After months of plotting and scheming and prototyping and testing and fighting with EAGLE, the first production batch of the Freetronics Ethernet Shield with Power-over-Ethernet support has now landed. Ahh, it's a beautiful thing:
As explained on the product page it includes a few improvements to the reference design, such as:
With our midspan injector you don't even need to hack any network cables for a cheap DIY approach. Just plug it in and away you go.
Have fun!
August 13, 2010
July 20, 2010
We're starting to sell to a few international customers now (so far we've shipped to the US, South Africa, and Malaysia) so it's about time we set up some international resellers. We have five excellent resellers already (four in Australia, one in New Zealand) but we're particularly interested in adding some US-based resellers.
Want to sell our stuff? Please get in touch!
July 07, 2010
I love seeing the imaginative things that people create using either Freetronics products or ideas from Practical Arduino. Phillip Stevens has been working on a retrograde clock, and it's a great example of using the prototyping area on the TwentyTen to save fitting a prototyping shield for just a few parts.
Check out Phillip's excellent work on his blog:
http://feilipu.posterous.com/freetronics-freertos-retrograde-real-time-clo
May 31, 2010
The 433MHz Receiver Shield has been an unexpected smash hit, and now we've made it even better. The original design used an RXB1 receiver module just like the ones you can buy in Jaycar and other parts retailers. It's the small green PCB you can see here attached to the top of the shield.
The RXB1 is a self-contained radio receiver module that does the job of taking the raw radio signal with its ASK (Amplitude Shift Keying) modulated data stream and turning it into logical 1s and 0s to send out via a data connection to the Arduino for analysis in software. It's a handy little module that does the job very well.
But now thanks to some detective work by Marc and the assistance of contacts in China we've switched to the RXB6 module.
The main improvement in the RXB6 is greater sensitivity, allowing it to pull in weak signals that the RXB1 just can't latch onto. One of the things I personally use a 433MHz Receiver Shield for is collecting data from a La Crosse weather station (hmmm, I think that may have been documented in a book somewhere) and it's been very marginal with the weather station on the other side of a metal roof. Once I switched to a newer shield using the RXB6 all the reception problems went away and it's been perfectly reliable ever since.
May 28, 2010
One of the first TwentyTens to ship was promptly modified by Phillip Stevens to increase the MCU frequency from the factory 16MHz to 22.1184Mhz! Phillip removed the original crystal and replaced it with a higher-frequency part, and modified the MCU bootloader to operate correctly at that frequency.
See all the details (and a brief review of the TwentyTen) on his blog:
http://feilipu.posterous.com/freetronics-2010-arduino-overclocking-and-rev
May 26, 2010
Sometimes I come across symbols in circuit schematics that make me double take and say "what the...?" under my breath. Engineers seem to have a tendency to want to keep tweaking things even when they're "good enough", and the result is a huge variety of symbols used to represent even common parts.
There have been many symbol guides published online over the years, but "Electrical WHAT?!" is probably the best I've seen yet. Check it out at http://electricalwhat.com/
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