Hacky Halloween is back! We’ll be in the Atrium at THEMUSEUM on Saturday October 27th for another day of pumpkin carving and soldering!

Participants are supplied with a free pumpkin to carve, along with a Kwartzlab kick – a programmable electronic kit that you can learn to assemble and solder yourself. The kit is setup to flicker lights just like a candle flame!

Along with the main event, we’ll soon be announcing free workshops happening in early November for Hacky Halloween participants to come into Kwartzlab to hack their kits, brainstorm ideas and more!

Hope to see you there!

Hacky Halloween is open to all ages and is free to attend. THEMUSEUM admission rates still apply to other exhibits.

Posted in Announcements, Events

I spent some time learning about the chipKit and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get up and running. I assumed that “Arduino Compatible” was a marketing gimmick, and the only thing compatible was the shield pinout.

However it uses an IDE forked from the Arduino IDE, and uses many of the Arduino functions and libraries so that many Arduino projects can be recompiled for the 80MHz PIC32 with little or no changes to the source. You can also use Microchip’s MPLab too if you need a more powerful development environment.

The Basic I/O Shield is very convenient. What caught my eye was the four FET switches (20V, 3A) and 4-line OLED display. It also has an EEPROM, temperature sensor, I2C, and some switches and buttons. You can learn more about the board from Microchip, and there are some reviews of the board.

The Uno32 itself is also impressive. Besides running at 80MHz and 32 bits (versus 20MHz and 8 bits for the Arduino), it has 2 UARTs, SPI and I2C, way more memory, a RTC, and 42 I/O pins, including 12 analog inputs. Microchip has more details. There’s also a review. One gotcha I’ve seen so far is that the board is 3.3V and not 5V like the Arduino.

To get it running on my Windows 7 PC, I had to do the following:

1. Download and install MPIDE from GitHub.
2. My PC couldn’t detect the Uno32 board, so I installed the latest FTDI drivers.
3. I downloaded the Basic I/O Shield libraries and unzipped them to My Documents/mpide/libraries.

That was it. It took just a few minutes to look at their samples and get something working.

There’s an active forum at http://www.chipkit.org/forum/ with links to additional libraries, and help/information.

I’ve only been using it for the morning, but I”m quite impressed with it so far. I’ll try porting my Arduino MIDI-CV Shield which will be a true test. But in the meantime I have an idea for another project that’s perfect for this board…

Posted in Member Blogs

Three chipKIT “Arduino compatible” development kits and shields arrived from Microchip for the ChipKIT Platform Design Contest.

Information about the chipKIT: http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=1406&dDocName=en559601

Information about the contest: http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en_us/promo/chipKIT/

Posted in Announcements

Over the past few months, Richard and myself have been trying to get the LPKF PC board mill working. The past few weeks we have been joined by Tennessee, who has been invaluable in homing in on the problems. We’ve been doing this on a weekly basis at pretty much every TON since the start of the summer.

At last report we had the main board in the mill working properly, allowing XY motion, head lift/lower, and chuck open/close. Getting the mill to this stage required replacing a shorted capacitor in the 5-volt power supply.

However, the so-called HF board which controls the spindle drive and tool crib is still non-responsive. It was not clear originally if this board was defective or whether a problem in the main board was impeding communications between the boards.

In August, Chris Ware from LPKF came to have a look, and determined that the problem was in the HF board, and later provided a price quote in the order of $650 for a board (with trade-in), shipping and taxes extra. Not having that kind of pocket change we persevered in diagnosing the problem.

One week we convinced ourselves that the communications were fine (both ends of the board-to-board connection use RS232 driver chips, which are pretty resilient).

Another week we determined that the “overload” light on the HF board was due to a power-up transient not being reset by the firmware, which in turn implied something else was getting the firmware upset.

Another week we determined that the processor was not even running (or, at least, not doing any program ROM accesses).

Another week we determined that the processor RESET line was being held low; it should normally hold low for 10-20ms on power up, then go high allowing the processor to run.

The next week a closer examination revealed that the RESET pin was not making contact in the IC socket anyway. Somehow the pin in the socket had been pushed back and was not springing out to contact the terminal on the IC. However, inserting a small wire to make full contact made no difference.

The RESET pin is driven by a very simple circuit: It is grounded through a capacitor, so on power-up the pin starts off at ground. The processor chip has an internal pull-up current source on the pin which charges the capacitor towards +5V. Once the capacitor is charged enough, the Schmidt-trigger input tied to the pin senses the end of the Reset state and starts the processor running. At least, that’s how it is supposed to work. In our case, the pin was being held stubbornly at about 35mV (when a wire was used to make the socket pin contact the IC pin). Using an external resistor to +5V to try to pull it up only raised the voltage by a few mV, which implied that there was (somewhere) about 20Ω to ground on the pin. On the other hand the external capacitor checked out fine.

This week, given that the socket was clearly defective and the processor condition was unknown, we pulled the processor from its socket and removed the socket from the board. The board (a fibreglass one) suffered some delamination in the process but all the vias are still fine. Cleaning up the solder holes in the board was a bit comical: we had Tennessee with the soldering iron, Richard holding the board, and me holding a vacuum cleaner nozzle to the back of the board, to suck all the holes clear of solder to allow a new socket to be inserted. It worked like a charm (and the vacuum nozzle was grounded metal so no worries about static discharge damaging the board).

Richard is holding the edge of the board (and the camera), I’ve got the vacuum cleaner hose under the board, and Tennessee is holding the corner of the board and wielding the soldering iron. It looks really awkward but was very effective at clearing out the solder from the holes in the PCB.

For next week I will have a new socket so we can see if this magically fixes the problem; if not we will have to try replacing the processor. Fortunately they are still available as NOS from Hong Kong, and they contain no ROM so we don’t have to worry about programming them.

Posted in Projects, The Heavy Lab, TON in Pictures

Come out to the Raspberry Pi Jam on Saturday Sept. 15, 2012 at 4pm and laser cut a case.  Show off what your Raspberry Pi can do. Make a case with our laser cutter. Learn how to write code for it and much more! Open to all.

Posted in Events, Projects

So I’ve decided that it’s time to expand my horizons and put a new programming language under my belt. I’ve been told by a number of people now that Haskell is awesome, so I decided to give learning it a go. I’ve been reading over Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! I’m not done reading through it, but I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Haskell. Anyhow, over the course of my tinkering around with Haskell, I’ve learnt that Haskell is full of freaky voodoo mathemagics (yes, that’s a word now).

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Posted in Member Blogs | Tags: haskell, voodoo

I used the laser cutter to make a set of coasters with stylized pictures of  a couple whose wedding’s coming up.

The end result!

The pictures are etched in paint on plexiglass.

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Posted in Member Blogs

I wanted to be able to communicate and play with my Raspberry Pi.  Specifically, I needed it to be set up with the following:

• Monitor
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Intarwebs

For the monitor, I happen to have a few to play with.  Unfortunately, they’re all VGA, and the Pi only outputs to composite and HDMI. Also, since I don’t have a spare wi-fi USB stick, I can only hook the Pi up to the network at the router – which is far from my desk.

So, I decided to look into a “headless” option – running the Pi without any peripherals, connected only to the router.  I wanted to be able to control the Pi from not only a shell (SSH/Telnet) connection, but also via its GUI.  Turns out, for a total Linux n00b, it wasn’t so hard to do – just a matter of researching and experimenting.  Here’s what I did.

Get thee to an OS

To start, I got an SDHC card (8GB, but I think a 2GB one will suffice), which will hold the OS “image” (data and applications), and inserted it into a PC.  As of August 12, 2012, the current OS of choice according to raspberrypi.org is Raspbian Wheezy.  As per instructions, I downloaded the SD image, as well as Win32DiskImager (careful – the latter has a few false “Download” advert buttons).  I then used DiskImager to install the image (Don’t just copy the image to the SD card – it won’t work!)  I then tested that the OS booted up on the Pi by sliding the card into the Pi. This is required before you can do the headless connection, so it requires borrowing a keyboard and monitor that has HDMI or composite support.

My main monitor accepts composite (I don’t recommend this – so blurry!), so I attached that.

Get an SSH connection

First, I had to get SSH set up.  SSH is like a command-line interface, like Telnet – think being able to type and run DOS-style commands, but on another computer.

I then booted up the Pi, and started raspi-config (this runs on first boot).

Unfortunately, I had an error where the SSH keys would not generate, with the message: “Invalid ssh key generation still running. Please wait and try again.”  So, I exited raspi-config, and ran the following at the command line:

sudo rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host*
sudo ssh-keygen -A

Then I re-ran raspi-config, then selected “ssh” again to restart the SSH service, and set a password.  Success!

Connect to network

I was then able to disconnect the Pi from the monitor/keyboard, and connect it to the router.  This router controls my local area network (LAN), so I should be able to connect to the Pi from another computer within the LAN.  First, I had to find what IP address the router reported the Pi at.  I found that the hostname of raspberrypi usually works.   If not, try the following:

I consulted the manual of the router, which directed me to load http://192.168.1.1/ for my Linksys WRH54G in a browser (Your router may have a different address).  The front page shows all connections, and I was able to easily find my Pi. In this case, it’s at IP address 192.169.1.106.

Phone home

I then installed PuTTY, which is a pretty good, simple SSH client.  I opened it and set Host Name (or IP address) to the IP address of the Pi, and clicked Open.  I was immediately prompted to log in.

 login as: pi
 pi@<IP address>'s password:  <SSH password I set in raspi-config>.

If you get something like this screen, you’re doing it right.

Getting a window

The next thing was to be able to see the PI’s GUI on my desktop.  I followed the instructions here to install TightVNC on the Pi.  This involves using apt-get, an application that installs Linux apps from an online repository.  It’s an extremely useful and quick way to install the most popular free software.

sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
 /usr/bin/tightvncserver

You’ll need to set a password as well.

On the desktop machine, I then installed a VNC client.  Both TightVNC and Real VNC have good clients.  I’ll show TightVNC connecting.  I installed and started the client, and typed in the IP address.  NOTE: You need to append “:1″ to connect on port 1 of the Pi.

And if you get a screen like this on your PC, then grab a party hat, because you’re done!

Posted in Member Blogs

Hey, I painted the Heavy Equipment Lab door today.

Here is how the door originally looked. Not very inviting, and very beat up, with many layers of tape and cruft from years past. I couldn’t help myself.

Some tools I used. I got a pair of vinyl decals from XL Screenprinting, some John Deere Yellow spraypaint, matte black, tape, and a set of protective masks, all from KW Surplus.

The door is off its hinges and in the painting booth! I used a razor scraper to remove the tape and residue, filed down the burrs from ancient drilled holes, then cleaned it down with a wet cloth.

I painted it yellow first, concentrating around the edges and top half, where the hazard stripes and logo will go. I actually had to go get another can of paint, as one is not enough for a door.

I marked 45-degree angles by measuring a square on the door, then running tape from one corner to the other. I placed rows of tape carefully, one after the other, until the door was completely taped. Alternating rows I only used a couple of short pieces, just to keep subsequent rows lined up. I then removed the small pieces. I marked the inner rectangular area, then cut and removed those inner pieces.

I added a decal to the top-centre, smoothed down all the tape and decal with a putty knife, and then painted it all black. I can’t wait to peel back the results!

Peeling off the tape! Now it’s looking like a door! It’s mostly coming off easily.

The door, finished and re-hung! There are bits where the paint peeled off with the tape. They’ll be touched up with model paint.

Posted in Member Blogs

Another year, another fun-filled weekend at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Agnes, Ben, Bevan, James and yours truly spent the weekend manning the Kwartzlab booth, handing out hundreds of buttons and stickers, meeting a plethora of really interesting folks, and chilling with peeps from other makerspace booths such as Kansas City, PGH (Pittsburgh) and I3.

Thanks to those above who came out to man the booth! Special thanks to Agnes for the banner and fabric plants, Ben/Bevan/James for making stickers and buttons, Ben for the Kwartzlab passport stamp, Mark P for the TARDIS and glowing Kwartzlab sign, Chris B for the mechanical webcam eyes project, Paul W for the Bananaphone, Jeff S for the laser guitar and Brainiac component tester.

We won an Editor’s Choice ribbon! Woot! And Agnes won three for her booth, Agnes Makes! Woot^3!

Pictures are pending!

Posted in Member Blogs