For Science

I’ve seen and read the “Logic Noise” articles on Hackaday in the past couple of month. I liked them, and knowing that building the circuits will be lot’s of fun I’m having a go at them all.

In part nine of the series there popped up a section called Part list. That was too much, I now had to go build these for myself. Just before going on summer holiday I ordered all I could find on Ebay and Aliexpress. Returning from holiday I was welcomed by this pretty sight.

Within another week I received the potentiometers and some more chips.

Remembering the times where I couldn’t find parts I knew I had lying around somewhere, I decided to label and store them right away in one of the empty boxes we all have but can’t decide on what to store in them.

One thing that’s missing in the “Logic Noise” series is a link from one article to the next. I keep on searching for articles for lack of a summary page. So here is a summary page with the articles

1. Logic Noise: Sweet, Sweet Oscillator Sounds

2. Logic Noise: 8-bits of Glorious Sounds

3. Logic Noise: The Switching Sequencer Has the Beat

4. Logic Noise: Sawing Away with Analog Waveforms

5. Logic Noise: Filters and Drums

6. Logic Noise: More CMOS Cowbell!

7. Logic Noise: Sequencing in Silicon

8. Logic Noise: Taming the Wild Shift Register

9. Logic Noise: Ping-pong Stereo, Mixers, and More find the partlist for this series halfway through this article

10. Logic Noise: 4046 Voltage-Controlled Oscillator, Part One

11. Logic Noise: Playing in Tune with an Exponential VCO

12.  Logic Noise: Digital to Analog with an R-2R DAC

13. 32C3: 20 Oscillators in 20 Minutes implausible stand-up comedy

Building a Bus Pirate

The dangerous prototypes Bus Pirate is a really cool probing device. A friend of mine also wanted to build one and that made ordering a few pcb’s an interesting option. Off course we went to dirty pcb’s as the boards are fully functional but not always perfect. That’s good enough for the low price they charge.

Now we wanted the Bus Pirate to fit on a 5cm * 5cm board but the layout is slightly larger then that. Well, my mate take the challenge to shrink the board and succeeded to do so. The silkscreen took a hit, but all components were squeezed into 5cm. It’s not perfect, for example the location of a decoupling cap should be closer to the pic. We received 14 boards and they all were just fine for what we wanted. The silkscreen is running a bit of the board, but that was our own doing. Something has to give when squeezing a design into max 5cm. 😉

buspirate plus 2 levelshifters in one 5*5cm pcb

After separating the boards

Split pcb, one buspirate and 2 levelshifter boards

Some parts we had available, most had to be ordered. Halfway through soldering components it looked like

Halfway soldered buspirate

The finished, flashed and now tested buspirate.

Buspirate, ready and tested

After building and testing the Raspberry Pi Supply Switch I moved on to adding an lcd display and rotary encoder. I sort of forgot how to wire the Pi Supply switch to Raspberry Pi. After figuring it out all over again I decided to document it.

First of all, if you haven’t build a Power supply switch yet, here are detailed instruction and the Eagle files on how to do so on a single sided PCB.

Connecting the two goes like this:

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