Brian's weblog

I was thumbing through some of my old del.icio.us bookmarks today, and came across sparkfun electronics again. Man, their coolness doubles in size every six months. $25 for a half-inch square self-contained radio data link, serial interface that you can run with a microcontroller, 3V, built-in antenna. Wow. $6 for a white Luxeon 1W LED ($8 for 3W, $25 for 5W). $5 for a 1W Luxeon that's TWO FRIGGING MILLIMETERS on a side. Holy crap.

And $20 for a color LCD like the ones from a cellphone. And speaking of cellphones, $184 gets you a quad-band cellphone module with a GPS receiver, camera driver, and a python interpreter. Add an antenna, a battery, a serial port, and a SIM card, and you've got a mobile data node. And I think you can even get prepaid SIM cards that can be topped-off online.

(note to self, places like this sell such cards, generally 5 to 20 cents per minute, which can be recharged with scratch-off coupons. And it looks like you can buy them from retail cellphone shops too. They all come with a phone number.. no wonder the phone numberspace is getting so crowded, you can buy them from vending machines in some countries..)

Each time I visit these folks (or browse through the digikey catalog, or just look through my old notebooks), I feel such a strong drive to build something. The delay involved in actually getting the parts usually means I don't get around to doing it. But maybe if I just keep buying stuff and stocking my workbench then the next time I'm in a construction mood I'll have everything I need already at hand and I can just start soldering away...

I've been playing with Phidgets recently, having a lot of fun. They're great for prototyping, but they would be too expensive to use for most of the production purposes I have in mind. I've been thinking that for gadgets I plan to make more than one of, I'd use an FTDI usb-to-serial chip (somewhere around 2.5UKP from their web store, and I think about $5 from the parallax store) and a small AVR microcontroller (for another few dollars). The FTDI web store also sells adapter modules (USB B on one side, header pins on the other) for 10UKP. For the basic make-lights-blink peripheral I have in mind, the FTDI chip alone would suffice, as it's got 5 GPIO pins in addition to the serial port.

I've played with the AnchorChips/Cypress EZUSB before, and it's pretty handy, and you can get them from digikey (page 493 of the digikey catalog lists the full-speed ones at about $10, and the high-speed ones from $15 to $20), but it uses an 8051 core, which is a real drag to program.

So I was pleased to see that Atmel is in the USB game, with their AT90USB1286 and related parts. 128K flash, 8K ram, firmware that lets you program the flash over the USB box, sample code and libraries to do mouse/keyboard/HID stuff (although it doesn't look like the sample code is under a free software license, boo), and a $31 evaluation kit (basically a USB dongle with breakout headers). Digikey has the chips for $14, and a cheaper 64K-flash version is due out soon.

And Atmel also has a handful of ZigBee/805.15.4 chips available, which could be really cool. They include the MAC stack. It's not clear where to buy them or how much they'll cost, though. It looks like there's enough RF goo that you'd want to go with the eval board, and that probably means a couple hundred bucks. But eventually this stuff will make it out to smaller boards.

They're also coming out with a new series of AVRs with really low power consumption, down below a microamp.