Illustrating circuits and electronics using Fritzing
I found Fritzing a few days ago and have been having a lot of fun with it. This free software/website combo allows you to easily create great looking electronics illustrations. It can handle pictures of the actual parts (like an Arduino and a bread board), schematics, and even PCB layouts.
I’ve decided this would be a great program to use for making illustrations for SproutBoard. Fritzing comes with a bunch of Arduino graphics but the SproutBoard is unusual in that it mounts an Arduino upside down. Nobody else does this so I had to make the graphic for it from scratch. It was surprisingly easy! Fritzing uses SVG graphics so I was able to create the image in just a few minutes using Inkscape. You can download my custom part if you’d like to use it. I plan on making custom parts for the SproutBoard as well, but those will be a bit more complicated so it’ll be a while before I finish them.
Read MoreUsing my Arduino, a 7-segment LED, and a shift register
I dug out a pile of my old electronic components to see if anything would be useful with my Arduino only to discover that most of the stuff I have just isn’t needed when you are using a microcontroller. I did, however, have a 7-segment LED. At first I plugged it into the outputs on the Arduino, but this used up nearly all of them to run the single 7-segment LED. I did some searching and came across the amazing shift register. I had never used one before, but found this great introduction at bildr, including sample code for controlling eight LEDs. I replaced the LEDs from the example with my LED segments and voila! It worked! I didn’t feel like getting my camera out, so this post has an awful cell phone picture with bad lighting. It is showing a J on my 7-segment LED.
Shift registers are amazing. I used an 8-bit shift register, which let me control 8 pins using only 3 pins on my Arduino. Even cooler, you can daisy chain the shift registers. For example, if I had two 8-bit shift registers then I’d be able to control 16 pins using the same 3 pins on my Arduino. With three 8-bit shift registers I could control 24 pins using only 3 pins, and so on.
These little gizmos cost $1.50 plus shipping at SparkFun, but if you are willing to wait for slow shipping from China then you can get a pack of 20 for only $4.99 with free shipping at AliExpress ($0.25/each). Turns out you can get a lot of the little bits and pieces available at SparkFun (like push buttons, ICs, and LEDs) for significantly less on eBay and AliExpress if you are willing to wait for it to arrive from China or Hong Kong.
Read MoreMy first Arduino
A few weeks ago I ordered my first Arduino as part of the SparkFun Inventor’s Kit. I bought direct from SparkFun without realizing that it was the same price on Amazon but with free shipping. Bummer, but I’ve moved on with my life. Anyways, it arrived today and I got to spend an hour or two playing with it. Oh man is it fun! The kit came with a few basic tutorials to get you up to speed with basic circuits (already had this covered) and the Sketch programming language (which is basically a version of C/C++), along with a small breadboard and a bunch of electronic components.
I ran through the first few example circuits and got to one that played a little tune using a piezo element (a little speaker). Anna really liked it, and I showed her how to hit the reset button on the Arduino to make it play the song again. I decided to make it more fun for her, so I added a few LEDs that alternate between yellow and red with each note, a push button to reset the song (so she doesn’t have to wait for the Arduino to reset), and eventually a second button to play a different song. She had a blast hitting one button for Baa Baa Black Sheep and another for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, both of which she has been singing nearly non-stop all week. I’m really excited to make a bunch of little electronic toys for her! I hope to make some worth packaging up as kits and selling on SproutBoard, but those projects will have to wait until we make a little bit of money off of the main product line.
In the meantime, maybe you’ll enjoy a video of Anna enjoying my Arduino:
Starting a new company
About two weeks ago I was happily drifting off to sleep when my cell phone rang. I hate getting voicemails more than I hate getting woken up in the middle of the night so I took the call. To my surprise it was a mission buddy, Jon, pitching me a business he wanted me to invest in. I’ve been trying to come up with a unique physical product to sell for years, so I was very excited to have one practically fall in my lap. I did some research, liked what I saw, and a few days later we signed an operating agreement for our new company. A few days after that (on my birthday!) we finalized a deal to purchase the rights to our new product from its creator.
So what, you may be asking, does this new company sell? SproutBoards. We aren’t a household name yet so you probably have no idea what that is, so let me explain. A SproutBoard is a sort of motherboard or breakout board for the popular Arduino microcontroller. This gives any SproutBoard user a slew of inputs that can be connected to sensors, outputs that can be used to control equipment, and the ability to use one of our acrylic chassis to mount their project on the wall or in a standard server rack. In addition to that we are developing software for the SproutBoard that will make it easy to tell your SproutBoard to take different actions based on the input of sensors.
So what can you actually make with a SproutBoard? Here are a few ideas:
- A server room monitor that can email, txt, or call you when the power goes out, it gets too hot, it detects flooding, or an unauthorized person tries to get to your equipment.
- An indoor greenhouse that turns the lights on and off as needed, maintains the appropriate humidity, and waters the plants when they get thirsty.
- A home security system that lets you use an RFID key fob to enter your home without a key, uses a low cost prepaid wireless service to alert you to problems even if the power is out, and lets you grant access to visitors even if you aren’t home.
- An aquarium control system that monitors temperature, pH, salt content, oxygen levels, and the water level, and lets you know the moment your fish are in danger.
Those are just a handful of the projects that we’ll be providing full tutorials and documentation for in the near future.
Well that is pretty much it for now. My partner and I have been working long nights trying to get the website moved over to our own server, getting documentation cleaned up, and doing all the tedious new business paperwork. We’ve been brainstorming new products and have a long (very long) list of products we plan on developing in the near future. It’ll be a few days before our inventory arrives so we’ve temporarily suspended sales but you’ll be able to place an order soon.
We are also gearing up for the Mini Maker Faire in Austin on May 5th. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend, but my partner will be there showing off a hydroponics system built using a SproutBoard. If you live anywhere near Austin, please stop by the Maker Faire and say hi to Jon for me!
Read MoreASUS RT-N66U Router
My old router started acting up, so I splurged and bought something fancy: the ASUS RT-N66U. There is a newer version that costs a little more and is a little shinier, but I don’t have any devices that would see a benefit from the more expensive router.
Anyways, this router is pure awesomeness. First of all, it does 2.4GHz and 5GHz, which is great because it means I can still use the internet even when my 2.4GHz jamming baby monitor is turned on. Second, even when I’m stuck with 2.4GHz, this router works much better than any router I’ve used in the past. I get incredible range and haven’t had any interference issues (keep in mind I live in a city with piles of competing signals). It also has quality USB support, so I can have an external drive plugged into it that all my computers can access.
But the feature I like the most, by far, is the built-in VPN. Basically this lets me securely connect to my home network (and the drive connected to my router) from anywhere I have an internet connection. I probably could have set this up on my old router, but it was really fast and easy on this router. It was also really fast and easy to set up the connection using the built-in VPN capabilities of Windows and also on my Android phone. For my phone, I used AndSMB to access my hard drive once I was on the VPN.
Photo courtesy of intdev under the CC BY-ND 2.0 license.
Read MoreFixing the digitizer on a Samsung Rogue
My touch screen on my wife’s Samsung Rogue U960 recently stopped working. There were no cracks or other visible damage, but it didn’t recognize touches on the left third of the screen. Because the phone was designed to be used almost exclusively by touching the screen, this made the phone pretty much useless for anything other than receiving calls or calling people already in her address book. She couldn’t set alarms, browse the web, or use any of her phone’s other fun features.
Samsung Rogue Digitizer
I decided this would be a fun time to learn how to fix a broken cell phone. With the help of Google and eBay, I discovered that cell phone touch screens have something called a digitizer that lays on top of the normal LCD screen. It is thin, clear, and is what actually “captures” your touches. The LCD screen itself is just a screen. Without the digitizer, touching it will just leave smudges. Turns out my wife’s digitizer was broken.
So I ran to eBay and found a US seller that had replacement digitizers for the Samsung Rogue for only $12.99. The price was right and I enjoy not having to wait for shipping from Hong Kong, so I bought it.
The picture on the right is what arrived. No instructions. No tools. Just the digitizer. Hmm. What to do with it?
I decided step 1 had to be “rip apart my wife’s cell phone while she was in the other room so she couldn’t freak out about said ripping apart of cell phone”. So that is what I did.
It was harder than I thought it would be. The Rogue has a piece of plastic on the back that covers/surrounds the camera. It is easy to get under the edge of it at the bottom, and really really hard to get under the edge of it from the top. What I didn’t know at the time is that it can only be removed from the top, so I’m pretty surprised I didn’t break anything trying to pry it off incorrectly.
The rest of the case came off pretty easy with the help of my trusty New Haven Public Library card. It easily slipped under the case and unlatched it without breaking anything.
Eventually I got the phone fully apart, took off some screws, and had the phone in 5 or 6 pieces sitting on my desk. With some effort, I removed the old digitizer. It was glued in pretty good. I put the new digitizer in place, but it didn’t quite fit right. Upon further inspection, I discovered that the cell phone had a plastic bump that my new digitizer didn’t have a hole for. “Stupid American parts. I should have ordered from Hong Kong,” I grumbled.
So I found a razor blade and started shaving off the plastic bump. It didn’t look like it was actually needed anyway.
This is when my wife walked in. Pro tip: Don’t let your wife walk in until you are done taking a razor blade to her phone!
After a few minutes of carefully removing the plastic bump (very carefully once my wife started watching), I was able to attach the digitizer, connect it to the appropriate daughter board, and screw everything back together. I put the battery in, hit the power button, and….
IT WORKED! Woohoo! I didn’t crack the screen or lose any screws or end up with too many screws or completely break the touch screen capability. I was pretty excited. Becca was, too, because it was like getting a brand new phone for only $12.99.
So before you suffer with a broken cell phone or ditch it for new one, consider searching eBay for replacement parts and fix it yourself.
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