Archive for the 'open hardware' Category

Electronic Design and Fabrication with gEDA

“Electronic Design and Fabrication with gEDA” is my first article in LINUX For You Magazine.

This is the first time I am forgetting to blog about my article. Actually it was published in last month(NOVEMBER 2009) issue. Please read it if possible.

This article mainly gives a quick introduction about gEDA. I have also given some snaps of my designs.

http://jeffrey.co.in/articles_talks.html

Robotic Pumpkin

See this cool open source project from Evil Mad Scientist

Make a Robotic Snap-O-Lantern!

AT90USB162 Mini Development Board

This time I am with an AVR USB board. It is an tiny development board for the AT90USB162 chips.  I have actually made this board design for my friend’s main project. The design has been made using gEDA. It’s an complete open hardware project. But still the schematics are missing.

Actually I have started drawing the board layout using pcb directly instead of using gsch2pcb. I will try to upload the schematic of the board soon as possible.

Special thanks to Sreeraj and Pramode Sir. This project was completed 3 months before. But I didn’t have much time for blogging. Sorry for the late post.

Here are some of the reference links
ATMEL AVR USB AT90USB162 MICROCONTROLLER PROTOTYPE DEVELOPMENT BOARD
AVRopendousDIP - avropendous - Open Hardware Development Board for the AT90USB162

Here is the board layout file.
sree-usb-noicsp.pcb

Here are some snapshots.

My New CPLD

Two days before I got my CPLD (complex programmable logic device). Here are some snap shots of my CPLD XC9536.

The main problem is that there is not much support for programming these CPLD xc9536 using free software. There are tools available for programming this cpld. But all of them are for Windows platform.

But there is a small hope. The xilinx website is giving a software named ISE WebPACK Design Software. It’s linux version us available for download.

I have to start hacking the CPLD soon. I have designed the PCB for the JTAG Parallel Cable programmer using PCB.

I would like to say special thanks to Omkar Kulkarni for helping me a lot. He has written a very good tutorial for programming this xc9536 CPlD. check this link   http://elecrom.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/getting-started-with-xilinx-xc9536/

Here are some links that might be useful.

ATmega8 Mini Development Board

In a pursuit of fabricating pcb’s, I have won. I had designed pcb’s boards using PCB. But when I tried to fabricate the pcb in my home, I used to fail. the problem was with the Acrobat Reader  . When I take the print out on the paper for layout transfer to the board, a size change occurs to the layout. This size change make the layout completely useless. Actually it was the wrong option selected in Acrobat Reader that made the size change.Now it is OK.

This is development board designed by me for the ATmega8 microcontroller. It is a miniature ARDUINO.  You can burn your bootloader and then use with Arduino IDE or you can simply upload your hex file using DAPA programmer circuit. If anyone needs its schematic file please post an comment or I will soon upload it when I am free.

Anyway this is an open hardware project. I will try to upload the details soon. If you are in a hurry, please comment so that I can upload the details fast.

Here is the PCB layout files http://jeffrey.co.in/files/mini-AVR.pcb

These are the two snap shots of my board