Atmel is everywhere at the 2013 Maker Faire, episode 5

So after seeing Atmel in the parking lot, and a hexapod 3-D printer, a Geiger counter and a bike lite powered by Atmel, I looked at some of the fine-art installations over in the corner of the pavilion. There I spotted Ghostmatrix, a robot that dragged flashing optical pipes over glow-in-the-dark plastic to make a spooky ephemeral message.

The Ghostmatrix at Maker Faire 2013 had a smaller platen to better install on the wall. Turns out Ghostmatrix is by Jonathan Foote, a well known Maker from San Francisco. My friend Windell, a co-founder of Evil Mad Science, had introduced me to Jonathan earlier in the day, but I never made the connection, simply because Jonathan is not the kind of fellow to brag about his installation.

Windell Oskey and Jonathan Foote talk tech in front of the Evil Mad Science booth at Maker Faire 2013.

I poked around the internet and was delighted to see that Ghostmatrix is based on the AdaFruit MiniPOV (persistence of vision) kit which uses the Atmel ATtiny2313V-10PU microcontroller.  And I was also happy to see Windell’s pal Super Awesome Sylvia has built the basic miniPOV kit. If a 12-year-old can build it and get it working, you can build it and get it working. If anything, write Sylvia and ask for help.

And here is another art installation that just tickled me. It’s basically an endless loop of 16mm film that displays specific frames in the holes in the wooden strip on the front. I guess you can use it to come up with your lotto numbers, as it’s called Your Lucky Numbers by Christopher Palmer.

12 year old CEO shows off Atmel powered robots

Meet Quin, CEO and founder of QTechKnow. Unlike most CEOs, Quin is just 12 years old, but that hasn’t stopped him from running a wildly successful electronics blog, his own YouTube channel and amassing a ton of loyal friends and fans on Twitter. The mini maker has a major passion for electronics and especially Arduino, having racked up a plethora of advanced projects and even making his own PCBs.

Atmel caught up with Quin at Maker Faire in San Mateo last weekend to examine a couple of his creations, the Fuzzbot and the Android DiceBot.

Fuzzbot is an awesome, fast, fully autonomous small Arduino robot which uses the compact Pololu ZumoBot Chassis kit for a great drive system, and uses a Parallax Ping sensor to sense proximity, to make it fully autonomous.

Quin says he likes to think of the Fuzzbot as a cheap and hackable “mini Roomba” because it uses a Swiffer Duster on the back to pick up any unwanted dirt off of the floor.

Quin programmed the Arduino code using the simple Pololu ZumoBot library, and used the Ping library to interface with the Ping sensor.  The FuzzBot also has a pan/tilt servo for the Ping sensor, and can be used with the Servo Arduino library. You can check out the parts Quin used in the picture below:

DiceBot, on the other hand, is an electronic dice that fits into an Android figurine.  It has a 7-Segment display, a 74HC595 shift register, an accelerometer, and an ATmega328p (the Arduino microcontroller).

Quin said he used his Pineapple library to drive the 7-Segment LED with the 74HC595, his Quasi-duino core for the ATmega328p without the clock, and the free Arduino IDE to program the ATmega328p.

Here are the parts Quin used when putting together Dicebot:

A tiny low-cost logic analyzer

When I was at Maker Faire this year (2013), my friend Phil Sittner came up to the Atmel booth and told me that I had to see something on the other side of the show floor. Phil is the guy that built a $400 network analyzer kit a few years ago. So he takes me over to the Saleae Logic booth. Lo and behold he had managed to find a small, inexpensive logic analyzer housed in a beautiful billet aluminum case.

The Saleae logic analyzer hooked to an Arduino. It’s cross-platform and will display on your Mac, PC, or Linux box.

Saleae makes two versions—the $300 Logic 16 has 16 channels. You can sample two of them at 100MHz, or 4 channels at 50MHz, 8 channels at 25MHz, or all 16 channels at 12.5MHz.  The Logic 16 has an input voltage range of -0.9V to 6V, and works with 1.8V, 2.5V, 3.3V, and 5V systems. The original model, the $150 Logic, has 8 channels that you can sample at 24MHz. Logic accepts voltages from -0.5V to 5.25V, and has standard CMOS thresholds of 0.8V for logic low, 2.0V for logic high.

Nathaniel Lozier handles marketing for Saleae while Jonathan Georgino is the hardware and firmware engineer that made the magic.

Nathaniel and Jonathan were clearly proud of the beautiful job they did with Saleae products. An engineer from Gould Biomation told me designing test equipment is a real challenge since it has to be better than whatever it is testing. He confided that Gould designed to typicals and just swapped boards until they got a machine that met the spec.

You can troubleshoot your Arduino system with a Saleae logic analyzer.

At the Maker Faire booth Nate and Jonathan had the Saleae logic analyzer hooked to an Atmel-based Arduino. Any working engineer can appreciate the tiny footprint of the Saleae Logic analyzer. I remember consulting at Teledyne 15 years ago where we had the classic and expensive HP 16500 mainframe. It was nice because you could stuff a 2GHz scope card in one the slots, but the thing was gigantic. Since it was so big you had to push it way back on a shelf out of the way. That meant you had to reach out and lean to touch the screen or spin the accursed single-knob user interface. Our solution was to get a mouse for it so we could interact with it no matter how far back it was on the bench. Even the pods were big, larger than the entire Saleae Logic 16. As Russell Crowe said in Master and Commander “What a fascinating modern age we live in.”

The Saleae Logic 16 is not just pretty on the outside—the cross-platform user interface is sleek and modern.

Speaking of fascinating and modern—check out a screen shot of the Saleae Logic analyzer. It’s obvious the device can sort through basic logic problems. But Nate told me you can also capture higher-level protocols to help you figure out what is going on in your SPI ports. My consultant buddy John Haggis says any serial port will eat up 6 person-months of time to get working. That is not just hooking up the wires, but getting all the low-level and high-level protocols and error conditions figured out. He was half-joking, but I suspect he is closer to the truth than far from it.

Google’s Eric Schlaepfer, Consolidated Electrical Distributors’ Phil Sittner, and Atmel’s Eric Weddington are all smiles while they check out the Saleae Logic products at Maker Faire 2013.

Nate told me he would send me a Logic 16 to try out. You can bet I will be showing it off to Eric, Phil and my other pals at the next eFlea breakfast. My mechanical engineer pal Dave Ruigh will be especially delighted to scope out the Saleae, since he was the guy that made a billet aluminum Palm case years ago. I hope Nate realizes that my maniac friends will whip out tiny tools and have his beautiful Logic 16 in pieces on the table—that’s what happens when you toss cool hardware at a group of engineers. It’s like raw meat to hungry lions.

Atmel lets its Geek flag fly!

May 25th is almost upon us, and as all of us Atmelians know, that means Geek Pride Day!

To celebrate this glorious occasion, we’ve created a rather nifty infographic, charting the etymology of the word “geek” and some of the geekiest twists and turns in the history of the Internet of Things (IoT). Because, let’s face it, there’s nothing more geeky than a thing that’s connected to the internet. Especially if that thing is a toaster.

So, check it out! And if you like it, please feel free to post it, or send your geek love out to the universe with the hashtag #AtmelGeekPride. Because no one <3’s geeks the way we do!

Atmel is everywhere at the 2013 Maker Faire, episode 1

As I walked around the 2013 Maker Faire in San Mateo, it seemed that everything that interested me had Atmel chips inside of it. Even before I got inside a pavilion Saturday, there was a full-sized flight simulator as I walked in the gate.

The Viper Flight simulator is a kickstarter project that actually got built. Created by a team of high-school students, the Viper was at Maker Faire with its mentor’s family, the DeRoses.

Dad Tony DeRose told me “we use Atmel all over” the project.

Something tells me the real brains of the outfit is mom Cindy DeRose, here standing next to some of the simulator’s controls.

And every engineer can commiserate with having to crawl under the control panel to work on the electronics. We can see dad Tony handing a circuit board to ——

……his son Sam, who he described as the EE and ME of the project. Tony is no slouch himself, working over at Pixar as senior scientist and lead of research.

Frankly, it’s great to see something that actually gets finished on Kickstarter. We need another website called Kickfinisher, where Cindy comes over to your lab and tells you to stop playing video games and screwing off so you can get some work done. If you are a good boy she might bring some cookies and orange juice. In addition to a passionate core of mentors, it helps to have some sponsors, and Viper got support from Autodesk, Nvidia, and automotive repair shop Hawker Inc.

Atmel @ the Silicon Valley Maker Faire – Sarge the home patrolbot

So the 2013 Silicon Valley Maker Faire was held this past weekend in sunny California, with Atmel’s microcontrollers taking center stage in many creations, both big and small.

Although it is practically impossible to list all the devices at the Faire with Atmel microcontrollers under the hood, we’ll be taking the next few days to highlight a number of projects we came across while walking the rather expansive Faire grounds.

In this article, we’ll offer up a closer look at Sarge the home patrolbot, designed by the RoboRadix crew. Sarge’s basic function is to roam around a home or apartment, deftly avoiding pesky obstacles and keeping an electronic eye on things when its owners are out and about.

Currently, the good Sarge is a work in progress, but we were able to get a basic rundown from the folks at the Faire. Unsurprisingly, the ‘bot is built around the versatile Arduino UNO (ATmega328) or MEGA (ATmega1280), both of which are powered by Atmel microcontrollers.

Additional specs include two 12 Volts DC motors from an old lawn mower, a Linksys wireless IP camera, one Piezo Buzzer, two 12 Volts DC motors from an old lawn mower, one Pololu dual VNH5019 motor driver shield, one ultrasonic range sensor, two Sharp IR distance sensors, one Breadboard and power supply, one DC/DC power supply single Output 3A 15W 5-pin, one Power-Sonic 12V SLA battery and two 9V battery holders and 9V battery.

Oh, and yes, a special shout-out to the cool R2D2 unit (courtesy of Camp Peavy and their home-brewed robots) that was sharing the same exhibit table as Sarge. Sorry Sarge, we didn’t mean to make you feel inadequate, but we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to gawk at our favorite Star Wars droids.

AeroQuad is an open source ‘copter

The AeroQuad – which is being showcased this weekend at Silicon Valley Maker Faire 2013 – is an open-source hardware and software project dedicated to helping makers and modders construct their very own remote controlled four-rotor helicopters.

AeroQuad hardware often includes an Arduino microcontroller (Atmel Mega 2560 or Uno) as the flight controller board, along with an AeroQuad shield and various sensors, such as an accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer (heading), barometer (altitude hold) and ultrasonic sensors.

AeroQuad parts can be snapped up here, while AeroQuad software can be downloaded here. Additional information is available here.

Atmel @ Maker Faire in Silicon Valley

The 2013 Silicon Valley Maker Faire kicked off today, with hackers, modders, makers and veteran DIYs showcasing their creations, many of which are powered by Atmel microcontrollers.

Atmel’s booth – #625 – is drawing large crowds, with entire families clustering around to see the MakerBot: Replicator 2 desktop 3D printer, the Open Source Internet of Things (OSIOT) exhibit, the Puzzlebox Pyramid, Marshmallow Crossbow, Hexbugs and Faraday bikes.

There are literally thousands of cool creations here at the show so stay tuned for more. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures below!

Atmel hearts Makers, and here’s why

The Maker movement is growing and starting to make its mark on business, the economy and everyday life.

While the movement may have started small, pushing up from the grassroots, Makers are increasingly thinking “big,” beginning to focus on broader based needs, from improving consumer products that could hit the mass market, to designing medical devices to fill industry niches, to revolutionizing STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education.

The fundamentally social nature of the Maker space is inspiring people to launch innovative products easily and cheaply. In so doing, it is empowering a new generation of small/medium businesses and entrepreneurs. Even the corporate world and investor communities are starting to sit up and pay attention to makers and ask what role they might play in their success.

3D printing and easy-to-use robots are spawning a new era of social, collaborative manufacturing, which while still in its nascent stages, is growing exponentially and piquing the imagination of millions.

The Economist recently dubbed the burgeoning phenomenon “The Third Industrial Revolution” with the Boston Consulting Group noting that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals and machinery, 10-30% of the goods that America now imports from China could be made at home by 2020, boosting American output by $20 billion-55 billion a year.

In a recent study of makers themselves, 46 percent of those polled said their commercial making activity was or would be their job, while 20% said they currently held “Maker” jobs.  83 percent were already employed and 31 percent had job titles in technical areas involving science or engineering. Two-thirds work in private industry. In addition, 56 percent of makers said they had applied for a patent or trademark.

Meanwhile, one in five makers said they had been approached by a commercial enterprise about an idea or prototype, which shows that the level of commercial enterprise interest is increasing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, chipmakers are eyeing the maker movement as a possible development community for the internet of things, tapping in to the passion and creativity to revitalize their own research and development efforts. The manufacturing sector, in particular, could benefit from the entrepreneurial spirit and creative instincts of the makers, who find fixes to problems at a fraction of the cost.

Most chipmakers have produced inexpensive development boards for this very purpose, seeding them out among makers and keenly following their progress. While Raspberry Pi and Beagle Board have gained momentum among makers, however, it’s still Arduino that captures the hearts and minds of the majority.

Atmel, of course, makes the processor that sits on this incredible open source circuit board and is therefore at the very center of the whole Maker revolution.

At their basic level, Atmel’s microprocessors provide a minimal amount of computing power, with digital inputs and digital outputs. Many have an analog to digital converter built into the chip, allowing for sensors to be attached. At the higher end, some come with HDMI out, Ethernet, and WiFi built into the chip.

Of course, hardware is just the building blocks. On the software side, Arduino provides a Java-based Integrated Development Environment that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The code is based on C, and multiple libraries are included to interface seamlessly with various add on shields.

Credit: Funwithdc.com

For many makers, Arduino is the easiest and fastest way to go from platform to prototype, and the best part is that you don’t have to be an engineer to use it.

Like open source-software before it, open source hardware is making its presence felt, even in the corporate world, being championed by a maker movement happy to blaze a trail before business models have yet to set. Like the early champions of Linux, these frontrunners can be thought of as pioneers, to be ignored and dismissed at corporate peril. After all, isn’t the basis for Android Open Source?

If you want to see what all the Maker buzz is about, why not stop by the San Mateo Maker Faire this weekend (18/19 May), or follow @Atmel and Twitter hashtags #MakerFaire #AtmelMakes and #Whatwouldyoumake for regular updates from the show!

Evil Mad Science and Atmel at the 2013 Maker Faire

Many Atmel employees will be at our Maker Faire booth this weekend. I will be there both days and open-source guru Eric Weddington has flown in as well. The Atmel booth is right next to the Arduino booth, so we should be easy to find. Be sure to bring your sun hats and sunscreen since many attractions are outside and it is easy to get burned.

I also wanted to give a shout out to my pals Lenore and Windell from Sunnyvale kit maker Evil Mad Science. We met at the eFlea and I have visited their shop. I have bought two Alpha-5 clocks from them, knowing that the super-accurate real-time-clock combined with an Atmel processor will keep precise time.

I went to an open-house they had last year, and got these snaps. Be sure to visit their booth and check out their really cool kits. Here are some pictures:

Here is Windell showing off his latest project— The Digi-Comp, a ball-bearing operated mechanical computer.

Evil Mad Science does not re-sell cheap imported junk. They design, test, and package their kits right here in Silicon Valley.

Here are just a few of the kits Evil Mad Science sells. They all have great style, panache and entertainment value.

Every engineer needs a powerful CO2 laser cutter.

I wanted to show Windell’s bench, since we all can relate. Even young guys like Windell need microscopes to work on modern electronics.

They have this awesome CNC router at Evil Mad Science. That is one of their motion-sensitive LED panels on the bed. You wave your hand over it, and the lights modulate.

Here is a close-up of the light panel. I am pretty sure they use Atmel chips in it.

Typical Maker—Windell spent months designing and perfecting this custom cabinet, rather than buying some chipboard stuff from Ikea.

Here is Lenore, the co-founder of Evil Mad Science. She is holding up my pal Ron Quan’s new book on building your own transistor radio.

And here is Ron, who came down to the open house at Evil Mad Science because he is a maker as well as a brilliant engineer with 65 patents and membership in SMPTE, IEEE, and the AES.

Hope you like the peek inside Evil Mad Science. I will be writing up experiences at Maker Faire as well as keeping you up to date on Ron and Atmel and my other pals.