Linduino is a USB-isolated Arduino

My pals over at Linear Technology have developed the Linduino board to drive their ADCs (analog to digital converters) and DACs (digital to analog converters) as well as temp sensors and other devices. The board is not a clone of an Arduino, that would be pointless for them. Linear Tech sells analog chips, not Maker boards.

The Linear Technology Linduino board uses the same Atmel chip as a Arduino Uno, but has isoalted USB and more dc power.

So the first and most essential difference is that in addition to the normal shield headers on an Arduino, there is a header that Linear Tech has used for years to drive their demo boards. This computer interface function used to be done with their DC590 interface board. Indeed, the firmware that comes shipped with the Linduino emulates that board, so you can run the original Linear Tech interface program on your PC, and it can’t tell if its the old board or a Linduino.

The Linduino board will accept all the Shield mezzanine boards for Arduino, but has this extra header to control Linear Tech demo boards as well.

But wait, there is more. So much more. Linear tech also used one of their USB isolators on the Linduino board. This means that the board and what you plug into it are galvanically isolated from the computer you have the USB plugged into. This means you can measure things off a car or an audio system without worrying about ground loops polluting the measurement. Its as handy as a hand-held DVM (digital voltmeter). My former employer Analog Devices also makes bidirectional USB isolators and there may be others that have come to market. You might make your own isolator, but the great thing about the Linduino is that all the system engineering is done for you and the firmware works.

The Linduino has a LMT2884Y-USB isolator module on it so your PC is not electrically connected to the Linuduino or its Shields or Linear Tech demo boards.

Since Linear Tech is also a power supply chip company, they beefed up the power supply on the board, using a switching regulator to replace the linear regulator on the Arduino. This means you can get 750mA out of the power system. Since a USB can’t supply this much power, that means you have to feed the board with an external wall wart. Now you have the power to drive actuators or other heavy loads.

Linear Tech also beefed up the power system with a 750mA switching regulator that will not get hot even at full load while dropping for a high input voltage.

Dan Eddelman worked on the Linduino as did Mark Thoren, my pal from Linear Tech. Tomorrow I will plug in the beast and  show how to get it working. I did have a few glitches the first time.

Mark Thoren, shown here giving his daughter some STEM instruction at the Silicon Valley eFlea, helped develop the Linduino.

Just like Atmel’s demo boards, Linear Tech is selling the Linduino pretty much at cost. This can give you a great foundation to build an isolated data acquisition and control system for cheap. And don’t forget, all the Arduino shields plug into the board and work with the existing libraries and firmware and available open source code. Linear Tech used the same Atmel chip as the Arduino, so this is not just “shield compatible,” is is truly compatible with an Arduino.

Pac-Man inspired suspenders brighten your outfit

Known as “FLORA,” Adafruit’s wearable electronics platform is built around Atmel’s Atmega32u4 MCU. The microcontroller boasts built-in USB support, eliminating the need for pesky special cables and extra parts.

Today on Bits & Pieces, we’re covering a vintage arcade game-inspired design by Becky Stern of Adafruit. No stranger to some sweet DIY wearable gadgetry, Becky’s Pac Man Pixel Suspenders will certainly add some pizazz to the way you hold your pants up.

This set of “blinken-braces” boasts 30 NeoPixels, each of which are sewn to these suspenders and powered by a FLORA main board running a dazzling Pac Man-inspired animation, Stern wrote in the project tutorial’s introduction.

Early in the tutorial, Becky breaks down the list of the materials needed for the project:

• 30 FLORA NeoPixel RGB LEDs
• FLORA main board
• 3-ply conductive thread
• 3 x AAA battery holder with JST connector
• 1 pair suspenders
• Sewing needle
• Sewing machine and thread to match suspenders
• Sharp scissors
• Measuring tape or ruler
• Taiilor’s chalk

If you were thinking about embarking on this project yourself, don’t let the sewing intimidate you. Becky knowledgably describes the stitching process, “Use a sewing machine set to a zigzag stitch to affix three strands of conductive thread to the suspenders along one side.”

So your sewing is complete, what’s the next move? Becky recommends that you begin to make all of the required data connections prior to putting away the sewing machine. She states, “When your thread gets short, just interleave it with the threads under the zigzags and cut off the tail.”

Moving forward, once data connections have been checked for shorts, the suspenders must be programmed. Prior to programming, Becky warns that, “If any of your connections are flaky, reinforce them with conductive thread.” After the proper code has been uploaded, you’re ready to wear your work!

Now that you know how to make a pair of your own, the question is, are you bold enough to rock these with your next outfit? We know someone who is…

Interested in checking out some other slick FLORA projects? Search through our entire Adafruit archive here.

And the Bend Your Mind XSense Design Contest winners are…

Back in December 2013, Atmel kicked off its global Bend Your Mind XSense Design Contest, where 
participants ranging from students to fashionistas were encouraged to stretch their imagination by submitting drawings unique designs utilizing Atmel’s flexible XSense touch sensor. Four winners — two first place and two second place — were ultimately selected by Atmel judges, based on originality, creativity and uniqueness of the designs, with winners receiving cash rewards.

Contest winners included:

• Technical Grand Prize Winner: Joseph Malkom, NewGen
• Technical Runner Up:  Andi Hidayatullah, Wrist Curved Tablet 
• Creative Grand Prize Winner: Raghu Vamsi, Touchscreen ID Card 
• Creative Runner Up: Arun Magesh, Rollable Laptops

“The devices and technological use cases seen in the ‘Bend Your Mind XSense Design Contest’ is yet a glimpse into the innovation and creativity that we see in today’s market,” explained Sander Arts, Atmel’s VP of Marketing. “Atmel congratulates all of the contestants and is thrilled to see such imaginative uses for XSense technology. With XSense’s flexibility and high-performance capabilities, the future of innovation is bright when creative minds have the technology to turn vision into reality.”

Joseph Malkom 

“Using the XSense touch sensor, this design can be used in the medical world. I got this inspiration after my grandmother had a small needle stuck in her foot and the doctor used three different xrays wrapped around her leg in order to pinpoint the exact location of the needle in her foot. However, by using this screen, doctors can have a 3D view of bones, veins and nerves, and can pinpoint exact locations of injuries. Moreover, by being able to change the view from bones to veins and nerves, they can prevent creating serious injuries, like accidentally cutting into a major vein. By using fiduciary markers, physicians can pinpoint the exact location of an object even if the patient changes their position. As there is a metal stand at the bottom supporting the flexible screen, the PCB can reside inside there.”

Andi Hidayatullah

“The idea of this design is to make a “wrist curved tablet” using combination of XSense and flexible OLED display as a curved touchscreen… It can be used by people in their jobs or activities while it’s not necessary to stop what they are doing or unable to take care the device.”

Raghu Vamsi 

“My idea is to provide some additional features to an ID card.”

Atmel XSense is a revolutionary, highly flexible film-based touch sensor that enables a new generation of smartphones and tablets, and extends touch capabilities into a wide array of new consumer and industrial products. Optimal for a broad range of touchscreen products, XSense enables thinner, lighter and faster touch products. XSense creates flawless touch performance, enhanced noise immunity, low sheet resistance and low-power consumption allowing designers to turn unique touch-based concepts into functional designs at lower total system costs compared to current market alternatives.

Interested in learning more about Atmel’s XSense? You can check out our Bits & Pieces article archive on the subject here.

IoT’s 7th layer will facilitate scaling and real-time

The spurring growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has taken rise in business, with a number of startups stemming from the software alley, Maker Movement and crowdfunded space already contributing to the industry. Within idea making and product baking, various origins ferment the constant demand for transparency and community. This reveals strong elements of Conway’s law.

The Internet of Things cannot evolve into what everyone expects it should without the larger open source component. Let’s go back and take a look at Conway’s law.  In perspective of both systems of the individual and organization, we are trying to create and the organization also creates it. Interoperability, integrations and the ability to share across communities hold the vital keys in the system.

An organization looking to build into IoT will need to help mature an open development organization, where we all have the ability to participate in the decisions, code, wiring, funding, and the ramp up of the work. By removing the attachment of intellectual property and changing the dynamics of the development team helps to keep things engaged and promotes the resolve attained by larger communities in moving forward and solving problems.

Partnerships across the breadth of business and enterprise will eventually surface the need to have wider and more comprehensive APIs; these APIs are agile and act as the seamless building blocks for sharing of data and bridging the real-time events into the symphony of various different devices, which can integrate easily into enterprise solutions. The API is the building block and cementing agent for innovative uses of connected devices — the Internet of Things.

For example, partnerships between two companies can quickly enable the creation of smart energy service, opening up opportunities to integrate energy appliances combined with data analytics showing home heating and air conditioning as well as consumer usage. An output like this not only creates added value chain, but also helps unify the customer-centric view for businesses wanting to grow closer with their customers, allowing them choices in their activity and usage.

The connected home market ― even connected consumer devices to energy harvesting ― will all require partnerships between companies, enabling them to deliver a smart energy service that integrates energy devices and appliances with data analytics around air conditioning and home heating systems designed for a device-agnostic platform. The partnership allows pools of expertise (enterprises, startups, or newly-established IoT services) to draw upon energy efficiency algorithms to enhance customers’ home energy use and automation.

Partnerships have already been used to spark and create new services for U.S. households. A growing number of sensors are emerging into the marketplace as well as threading these aggregate sensor results to end-to-end to products/solutions.

As previously seen on Bits & Pieces, we talk about PubNub. This is a service that is already widely used, distributing traffic to 200 million real-time IoT devices across 14 data centers worldwide, serving 3 millon messages a second all within a ¼ second in latency. That’s close to global real-time one can get with that many tenets/nodes on the cloud. In shear numbers, there are well over 1000s of apps leveraging this solution. In fact, this company has really got big plans for the Internet of Things, as it’s already powering thousands of real-time apps streaming 3 million messages per second to over 100 million devices each month. For example, just take some of their notable customers who are already using their services and technology to scale real-time applications and devices onto their own domain expertise solutions.

App developers like CBS Outdoor and Coca-Cola are using these integrations with real-time data aggregation transmitted by the sensors to produce some really powerful results. CBS Outdoor integrates sensors on embedded controllers to sync content on real-life digital billboards with online web displays using PubNub. Another IoT integration is found with Coca-Cola enabling friends to chat and annotate live video in real-time on the red carpet at the American Music Awards. The beverage giant has also introduced live voting (“You Decide the Ending”) and IoT experience synchronization using PubNub during their Cokechase.com campaign.

As demonstrated by both Coca-Cola and CBS Outdoor, companies are using/scaling this real-time device connectivity across their services. With their availability of an SDK kits for both Arduino (AVR-based Microcontrollers) and Rasberry Pi, Pubnub is quickly on their way to establishing a hook into the Maker Movement; a class of hackers, crowdfunded makers, creative tinkers, and app coders who can wield the power of this API to help take their ideas from prototype to a product.

This is all done with open code and idea contribution, building a collective number of APIs.

APIs are core to the expansion of IoT. What an inventor needs are the following:

1. A standard protocol (ie. Restful, CoApp, MQTT, etc)
2. A set of variables with enough data points to create a sophisticated algorithm that maximizes efficiency or augments information or experience
3. Arduino SDK (Development and Coding into AVR based Microcontrollers)

Pubnub is enabling their customers to rapidly develop, more importantly, scale real-time applications. Explore solutions to some of these examples they offer ranging from (1) challenges for IoT building, (2) building real-time dashboards to connected devices, (3) bridging devices across networks from lan to wan, (4) connecting the car, and (5) home automation.

Interested in learning more about the Arduino SDK kit? Please visit the PubNub Developer site and then get to IoT exploring. Get ready to jump start the rapid building and connecting of devices for the Internet of Things.

Drones!

So my buddy Andy Aronson over at honored competitor Texas Instruments mentioned he has a photographer buddy in Australia (check out his pic above) that just bought a new HD camera drone. No footage from it yet, the fellow is still sussing it out.

Andy also sent me a link to a video honoring my dear departed mentor Bob Pease. It must be drone season since that video had an advertisement for yet another HD camera drone, but one not yet in production. They had a video of the commercial as well.

I sent the link to a bunch of friends, noting that Arthur Clarke said “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but magic only sells when narcissists can use it for selfies. I also wondered if you had to have the fighter-pilot vision and reflexes of my buddy Bob Dible, who is an RC model racer champion in order to fly them. I guess so. My crack protege Francis Lau wrote back, noting:

My buddy got one and was showing if off to a few friends. He launched it and flew it straight up about 30 meters. It then promptly lost the GPS lock and started tilting forward towards the river. Controls were lost too and it was on its own in a trajectory towards the river. It wasn’t smart enough to just stay still if it lost connection. Alas, it was a short 30 seconds in the air before it hit the side pier wall of a house next to the river. It fell in and the quadcopter was lost forever. At least the thing was a freebie for my friend.

This was the model:

http://www.gizmag.com/dji-phantom-quadcopter/25672/

I’ve heard other stories of similar nature where the control isn’t very good and needs some work. Thousands lost and the promise of having an easy to fly drone not met.

Well the drone website says it will “…land automatically,” and I guess it did. So yeah, before you drop acid and take your new drone to the beach, you might want to work on your RC skills a bit, and make sure you know the limitations of the craft you just spend a few thousand bucks on. Otherwise what starts out like a Pepsi commercial might end up like a Greek tragedy.

Smaller electronics, smarter clothing

In a recent Gigaom article, Signe Brewster notes that a new generation of textiles is on the brink of redefining wearable technology.

To date, a great deal of wearable activity has been centered around companies like Arduino and Adafruit, both offering wearable electronic platforms powered by versatile Atmel microcontrollers (MCU).

Though we may have yet to find the easy-to-make smart textile, Brewster encourages startups wishing to do so need to find their fabric and sensors and then independently develop a way to combine them.

“What was missing until now were electronics small enough to fit into clothing the same way as a button or a single cotton fiber.” With the advent of Arduino Lilypad (ATmega328V) and Adafruit’s FLORA (ATmega32u4), we’re seeing the emergence of the softer side of wearable technology, which hides LED lights, battery packs and electronic devices in the folds of clothing fabric. With more platforms readily accessible, we can expect to see more Makers creating a next-gen of wearable gizmos.

Ever wanted a t-shirt that can send and display text messages? Now you can — thanks to the latest innovation of startup, Switch Embassy. The only “scrunchable, washable and connected t-shirt” is embedded with LED lights, each of which are woven directly into the fabric.

“Until technology, like fashion, can augment who we are in the exact way we want, it won’t be compelling enough to wear on our bodies,” Brewster concludes.

Interested in learning more about wearable tech? Check out what Atmel has been up to in this exciting, evolving space.

Soil moisture sensor packs an ATtiny44A MCU

Powered by Atmel’s ATtiny44A microcontroller (MCU), Chirp is a plant watering alarm equipped with a soil moisture sensor.

According to a company rep, Chirp uses capacitive sensing as opposed to resistive humidity sensing.

Meaning, it does not actually make an electric contact with the soil, thereby successfully avoiding electrode corrosion and soil electrolysis – resulting in optimized accuracy and extended battery life.

On the hardware side of things, a standard AVR 6 pin ISP programming header is available on the board for programming and serial communication. The device acts as a I2C slave, so the header can be used to read the moisture and light levels. It should be noted that another microcontroller or a dev board such as Arduino can be used as I2C master to read those levels.

The alarm level is set for each plant individually, with Chirp configured to detect low moisture level and emit rare short chirps as appropriate. As more water evaporates, Chirp increases the alarm rate.

Chirp is currently available on Tindie at a $15 price point.

New shields for Arduino

Arduino has debuted two new shields for use with the company’s wildly popular lineup of Atmel-based boards.

First up is a USB host shield based on the MAX3421E. This USB peripheral/host controller contains the digital logic and analog circuitry required to implement a full-speed USB peripheral or a full-/low-speed host compliant to USB specification rev 2.0.

The shield can be used with the “USB Host Library for Arduino” hosted by Lauzus from circuits@home on GitHub (click to download zip).

Next up is the ArduinoISP (AVR-based in-system programmer) based on David Mellis’ project FabISP and useful to anyone needing more space on their Arduino board.

Interested in learning more? For more details about using the Arduino ISP please visit the Getting Started page. You can also learn how to program an ATtiny and read your Arduino built-in EEPROM using ArduinoISP on Scuola here.

Vehicle to vehicle communications, or V2V

While perusing my latest copy of American Motorcyclist magazine, I was pleased to see an article on how vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication might make roads safer for motorcyclists. V2V is where vehicles have their own dedicated micro-controller and wireless chip and security chip. Atmel makes all three, both as separate parts and combined into one. The vehicles will have a wireless RF “bubble” that travels with them. When two vehicle’s bubbles “touch”, then they will authenticate it is not some hacker on a bridge embankment. Then the vehicles can exchange information. It is anticipated that the system will have GPS, so each vehicle will know its exact position.

While drunk driving fatalities have plummeted, distracted driving is killing twice as many people.

As a guy with a broken collarbone that got hit from behind while my motorcycle was stopped for a red light, I think this is great. If vehicles can communicate they can warn each other of impending collisions. Auto manufacturers anticipate verbal and “shaker” warning for the cars, or so-called “cages” as we motorcyclists call them.

The AMA publishes the magazine and I am a proud supporter. One thing I disagree with is that the AMA wants motorcycles to be nearly silent. Now I hate open pipes, that is a moron thing to do since you can’t tune the motor because of the reversion pulses coming off the end of pipes. But silent bikes are too far in the other direction. With half the driver’s noses stuck in a smartphone while they drive, a little noise alerts them to my presence.

This V2V technology may make all this moot. I won’t need loud pipes if vehicles actively work to avoid collisions. I touched on this in an earlier blog post—Car-to-car communication.

Ai.Frame is an open source robot

The open source Ai.Frame – which recently surfaced on Kickstarter – is a versatile miniature robot powered by an Atmel-based Arduino Mini (ATmega328 MCU) paired with infrared and ultrasonic sensors.

“The robot’s sophisticated structure is designed to make motion both precise and versatile,” an Ai.Frame rep explained in a recent post.

“The Apollo [model offers] 16 degrees of freedom, while the Rex has 9. Operated by an efficient controlling system, the Ai.Frame executes your commands almost instantly.”

AI.Frame can be controlled via a smartphone or tablet, gamepad or even a wearable harness that accurately captures upper torso movements.

“As experienced engineers, we have a thorough understand of robot configuration and construction, [so] we incorporated rich body details into the Ai.Frame to simulate the structure of the human body,” said the rep.

“The Ai.Frame Apollo’s skeleton contains 109 pieces and its outer shell contains 12, while the Ai.Frame Rex consists of 98 pieces. We also made made a concerted effort to optimize the molding and screws for the strongest possible structure. Nonetheless, you can choose to either build an Ai.Frame from scratch or to have us assemble it for you.”

Additional advanced key features include:

• Roadblock avoidance
• Voice recognition capabilities
• Auto standing

Interested in learning more? You can check out the project’s official Kickstarter page here.