Spiff's Electronics Notebook

No longer accepting orders

Fundamental Logic will no longer be accepting orders (as of May 30th, 2010). All orders that have been placed to this point will be shipped (or in limited circumstances refunded). Kit documentation will remain active on the spiffie.org website and Fundamental Logic will continue to process orders from existing distributors.

Should you have any questions regarding the status of your order, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you, everyone, for your support over the previous years.

--The management

We've moved

We've relocated a short distance, so for returns, cheques, etc, please use the below address. For things already in transit, we'll have access to our old address for a short while. You'll also notice the new address on any receipts for the past week.

Fundamental Logic
404-182 Church St E
Brampton ON  L6V1H2
Canada

Please understand that we are still unable to accept walk-in business or pick-ups but we welcome email, fax, and telephone orders and enquiries.

Bus Pirate v1 PTH kits on sale

For people who love serial ports, through hole parts, and doing things themselves, we're offering our Bus Pirate v1 PTH kits for a cool $20 (or 32% off). The price goes up when we run out of this lot, so now is an excellent time to pick up an excellent development tool for an excellent price.

We sell tools and supplies

Tools and supplies have been quietly gathering, socializing, and multiplying in a corner of our stock shelves; the tools category, however, has been empty, now it's not.

We've been using and abusing these tools and supplies for a while now, and we're confident they don't suck. We're filling the the tools page up with tools and supplies we actually use or have used. We've started with solder paste, tweezers, solder, solder wick, and AC adapters, but we have more tools we're still putting through their paces.

Check it out!

Freeduino 2009 - a plain through hole modern 'duino

This one's been waiting in the wings for a while. The Freeduino 2009 is a through-hole Arduino clone with Duemilanove level features like auto power-supply switching, reset on upload, and everything else you'd expect.

The project page has lots more!

Introducing the Spiffie.org Bus Pirate PTH

Hack A Day made an awesome prototyping and debugging tool called the bus pirate. The bus pirate can interface with most serial interfaces (SPI, I2C, RS232, JTAG, 1wire, etc) and is controlled by a simple serial terminal. If you have a pc with a serial port and a bus pirate, you can talk to most serial chips.

The latest revisions, though, are surface mount, which isn't so hot if you're just starting out, so we've taken their design and converted to entirely through hole parts with plenty of working space.

Go ahead and check out the Spiffie.org Bus Pirate PTH documentation and the Hack A Day Bus Pirate page.

When you're ready, buy a kit, buy a board, or grab the sources and build your own.

Full Kit	Bare PCB

Have a KB on me!

Recently, Dave Brink proposed a smaller bootloader for the Arduino platform, while he specifically mentioned the ATmega328, the bootloader is common the common ATmega168. The new bootloader. created by a group of people, saves a full KiloByte of flash space over the regular bootloader, giving you 1024 more bytes of sketch space.

Go read about it now or just jump to the "use it" page!

We'll be shipping the new bootloader on our pre-programmed ATmegas and in our kits as they're updated. Don't worry, it's completely backwards compatible!

TC64x based fan controllers

Based on microchips TC64x series of chips, these are easy to build, use, and understand temperature sensitive fan controllers.

Checkout their project page or directions, then find them in the store or build your own from the sources.

Fading LED default test sketch

For some time now, every Arduino bootloaded ATmega we've shipped has come with a default testing sketch that slowly pulses the LED on and off in a cyclic fashion.

A "fading" sketch using hardware PWM is included in the IDE distribution under Examples→Analog→Fading to fade an LED, but the Pin 13 status LED isn't connected to a hardware PWM pin.

The answer is to abuse the delayMicroseconds call to create crude software PWM. By setting the pin high; delaying; setting the pin off; and delaying for a different period, we can change the brightness simply by altering the delay.

One catch to this approach, is if you use purely the on/off delay to control the PWM speed, you're left with either a very fast fade or an unsettling flashing. Instead we keep the delay between 4 and 250 µs (about 3 to 4kHz) and add an additional loop around each on/off loop to set the fading speed. --You can't set the delayMicroseconds code to 0 or you'll get an unexpectedly long delay.

Finally, we use the serial port to output a rising count, just to ensure the serial port works.

]]>

 // Fading LED
// by Spiffed <http://spiffie.org/>;
// original by BARRAGAN <http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/h.barragan>; 

int value = 0; 
int rep = 0; 
int ledpin = 13;
int count = 0;  // light connected to digital pin 9
 
void setup() 
{ 
  Serial.begin(9600);
  pinMode(ledpin,OUTPUT);
} 
 
void loop() 
{ 
  for(value = 4 ; value <= 250; value++)  // fade in (from min to max) 
  { 
    for(rep=0;rep <= 10;rep++){
    digitalWrite(ledpin, HIGH);  // sets the value (range from 0 to 255) 
    delayMicroseconds(value);  // waits for 30 milli seconds to see the dimming effect 
    digitalWrite(ledpin, LOW);
    delayMicroseconds((255-value));
    }
  } 
  Serial.println(count);
  count++; 
  for(value = 250; value >=4; value--)  // fade out (from max to min) 
  { 
    for(rep=0;rep <= 10;rep++){
    digitalWrite(ledpin, HIGH);  // sets the value (range from 0 to 255) 
    delayMicroseconds(value);  // waits for 30 milli seconds to see the dimming effect 
    digitalWrite(ledpin, LOW);
    delayMicroseconds(255-value);
    }
   } 
}   

Gold Phoenix Technology wishes us a Merry Christmas

Gold Phoenix supplies a lot of the PCBs used and sold at spiffie.org and Fundamental Logic. In our most recent batch of orders, they included the following card.

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I'm curious if other customers receive different cards?

MPGuino V2 Kits

MPGuino v2 kits are now available.

The MPGuino is an Arduino based open source fuel economy computer for most vehicles with electronic fuel injection and a vehicle speed sensor.

There are a limited number of version 1 kits still available for those wishing.

Full Kit

Email Delivery Issues

Over the past two weeks, Fundamental Logic & Spiffie.org have transitioned to a new internet presence. Unfortunately, this has caused some email from the past 11 days to be dropped or delayed (both inbound and outbound).

We currently have all mail from November 6th onward and customer service is working through the backlog; if you sent mail after November 6th, you should receive a response very shortly. If you sent an email prior to November 6th and have not received a response, please first check you bulk/spam/UCE folder, then send an email to service@fundamentallogic.com and customer service will make sure your request is taken care of.

Thank you for your understanding.

The ATXSwitch

The ATXSwitch makes it easy to add an additional ATX power supply to virtually any PC. When your primary power supply is turned on, the ATXSwtich automagically enables a secondary supply.

At only 10 parts and a PCB, it's super easy to assemble with the full-colour photo-based directions.

Head over to it's instructions or buy one below.

Full Kit	Board Only

Introducing the StickDuino

Whoa, how did we miss announcing this? The StickDuino is a fully featured Arduino clone (freeduino) that allows you to carry an Arduino compatible tool around in your pocket.

Head over to it's instructions or buy one below.

Fully Assembled	Board Only

Try Our Distributors

I'm pleased to announce even more ways to buy spiffie.org kits.

Wulfden at Hawk's Mountain

Wulfden carries the iDuino kit packaged up with their "Experimenter's Pack #2".

Maker Shed

The Maker Shed (from the folks at Make Magazine) now carry our USB7 w/ Mounting Holes kit