Another year, another Maker Faire. Yes! for this year it is nolonger “Mini Maker Faire”, we’ve just upgraded to the full fledged “Maker Faire” event. As Singapore Maker Faire has grown 10 times compare to 3 year ago, I am not able to cover every single booth or exhibit in the event. I only write about those I’m interested in.

An Augmented Reality Sandbox is a perfect application of Kinect. Originate at UC Davis, this construction is made by the students from Temasek Secondary School.

Benjamin Low and “Art makes us” team, who made the “Synesthete’s Music Machine” last year, have came back with “Neobombe”, a simulation of   Turing machine inspired by the movie “The Imitation Game”. This setup contains 11 Arduinos driving 36 step motors. The motors spin according to the enigma decipher algorithm running at backend. Since I’m too late to write his, Ben has already published his “making-of” article here.

Leon Lim, who is the “go-to” person for DIY PCB etching in the community, bought us two day’s worth of live etching and soldering workshop. Participants have experienced PCB etching using household suppliers, drilling and soldering. The end product is a cardboard dome with colorful LED lighting, very nice!

This ball shaped robot is developed by IDA Labs. It travels on the ground and also in water. But I really do want to see a BB-8 leh. Maybe next year?

Here comes some heavy weight electronics project. Design by Adnan of 2-Watt Elements,  Chippy is an “Intel Edison powered USB hub” Intel Edison breakout board that helps developer to access Edison peripherals much much easier. Interested people please take note, Chippy is coming to market coming September.

More interesting projects from local and overseas guest are better capture using video format:

Yearly Review

As I said Maker Faire is like a new year’s day to me. The past year is an exciting year, that I am able to monetize my project. I designed an ESP8266 breakout board and start selling on Tindie since February. As of today, I sold total 332 boards across 29 countries.  And this is mainly why I have not been updating this blog too frequently, because I totally underestimated the effort went into the production and sales of these boards. My initial idea was just to sell some extra pieces from my prototype lot and recover part of the cost. But in the process it becomes so welcomed that my I can hardly fulfill orders. I’ve not able to write too much code for ESP8266 either, which is a great pity.

A “good” news is ever since Adafruit, OLIMEX and Sparkfun start to produce their versions of ESP8266 development board, my sales drops like brick wall. But this gives me more time to work on the software side and do some new projects, stay tuned

And since I’ve done so much on ESP8266, I can’t help bring a project to Maker Faire. So this is my selfie with ESP8266 clock. The clock synchronize time from NTP, gather temperature/humidity and push to a MQTT broker, and display MQTT messages from my webpage (more on this in the following posts).

A big THANKS to Mr Teo Swee Ann and Espressif Systems to make this possible.

Rant

I hesitated a bit before write this part. It will hurt someone, for sure.

ARDUINO IS NOT ELECTRONICS!

I have been talking to some makers, attending some events, and people seems to mistake Arduino as the only electronics platform.

ARDUINO IS NOT ELECTRONICS!

I have to admit Arduino helps to lower the entrance barrier, bring people onboard electronics, which is fantastic. But do not claim you understand electronics because you can follow some online tutorials and create some Arduino projects.

The same applies to Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, Beagle Bone, etc.

I don’t know whole lot of electronics either.

I come across the Nah’s family who present this electronics learning kit in the Maker Faire. I personally give them the best project award.

This basic components block kit immediately reminds me of the Radioshark laboratory kit (clone) I started with. There is no shortcut to learning electronics. You still have to start with basic components and Ohm’s law.

For more expert advise, I highly recommend this eevBLAB episode.

/Rant over.

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Digging into BLE upgrade for Macbook Air Late 2010 results in many solutions. The best resource seems to be the “Continuity-Activation-Tool” project, which is made to enable “Continuity” feature on old Mac computers. Since “Continuity” depends on BLE, I suppose this will work with Lightblue Bean. For my model of Macbook, the suggestion is either to add a USB dongle or replace the Airport Extreme card. My poor Macbook only has two USB ports, so replace the Airport Extreme card seems to be the way to go.

The suitable replacement Airport Extreme card with BLE is BCM94360CS2. It can be purchased from eBay or Taobao at reasonable price (~US$20). The kind seller also included a Pentalobe screw driver in the package, which proves to be a life saver later.

For record purpose here are the screenshot of Bluetooth and WiFi page in “System Information” before replacement:

Open the back cover of Macbook Air *REQUIRES* the pentalobe screw driver, and never assume a multi-head screw driver set will contain one.

The original Airport Extreme card has a mouthful BCM943224PCIEBT2 model number. There are two ipx antenna connectors on board, assuming one for Bluetooth and one for WiFi.

My Macbook Air has 11 inch screen. The card placement is different from most online pictures which are for 13inch model. On the 13 inch model the card has longer edge parallel to the casing, but for 11 inch it is perpendicular. It is also reported on many online resources that the antenna cable has to be rerouted to reach the new card. It seems unnecessary for my 11 inch model. I can easily fit the two cables.

At the moment I have no idea which antenna is to fit into which socket. But my random connecting seems to be working. Also noted that the new card is longer than the old one, so the mounting hole is no longer fit. However the socket is tight enough to keep the card in place.

I assemble the back cover and turn on power. Not surprisingly everything “just works”. No error and no “install driver” kinds of message at all. Even the Wireless LAN password and Bluetooth paired devices list are preserved. Here are the system information after replacement:

The Bean Loader seems to be happy with the new card as well.

As a “side effect”, the “Continuity” feature works without any tweaking, together with the “AirDrop” functionality. The replacement worth every cents of it!

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The application is made with ESP8266 RTOS SDK. SSD1306 based OLED panel is connected on GPIO4/5 using software emulated I2C. I rushed this out last night and the code is in a mess now.To prevent bad influence I’ll release the code after I reorganize them.

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Wish you a very Merry Christmas.

VFDuino, Arduino compatible Vacuum Fluorescent Display module. Open source release imminent.

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Giant cardboard structures have become the signature for almost all Singapore maker events. This time we are welcomed by a friendly LED T-Rex.  Interested to see the making of it? Do watch the time lapse video by it’s creator Bartholomew Ting.

The presence of Sustainable Living Lab in the Maker faire had been growing each year. I give my personal “best project” award to the Mech Pong by David Teo and team. Watch the video to see how well it is constructed.

For the first time Colin of the Destruction Squad put up a non-stopping live tear down show. Kids love it. Remember I first took grandpa’s drawer locker apart, and trying to put back… What a mind-opening exploration… (~~ don’t turn it on, take it apart ~~)

Maker Leon Lim a.k.a circuit board man brought us a Christmas bag with bling bling electronics. Check the “double layer” construction.

Of course circuit board man always comes with circuit boards. He is also doing live demonstration of PCB etching using household products. And he just wrote a very nice guide!

Another project which has particular interest to me is the “Synesthete’s Music Machine” by Benjamin Low and team. The machine captures images and synthesis sound based on the colour. Listening it for a while and gradually you can imaging the colour just from the sound. Sorry it may sound dull from engineer’s description. “Art Makes Us” is Ben’s slogan, and yes designing such a project is art, and implementation is just minor engineering efforts.

I like two types of projects, that are particularly complex, or that are particularly  clever. The Homopolar Motor is the later. Originally invented by Michael Faraday almost 200 years ago, it still amazes me.

More amazing founding is from the Centre for Quantum Technologies of NUS. Mr Nick Lewty shows us Magnetic levitation of superconductor.

Just like previous two years, 3D printer takes a huge stage of the exhibits. While I’m a bit tired of the stereotyped RepRap derivatives, this year we have a locally designed 3D printer AMaker3D. This is a totally production level printer with well designed enclosure, nice touch interface and superb output quality (0.2mm resolution). Both mechanics and electronics are redesigned. And most impressively all the work are done by two lady engineers Shu Fen and Siew Hong within one year’s time! Please check their website and their successful KickStarter campaign. Support the local initiatives.

And let me have the shameless self-promoting in the end. This year I finally participated Maker Faire as a Maker. Together with Ridwan, Astrid and See Tho, we put up a project named B.en.G – Bicycle Energy Generator. We use a traditional bicycle dynamo and transform the output into a handphone charger. We also collect statistics data such as power generated, rider’s speed and total travelling distance. After two days of exhibition our bicycle has travelled more than 300km, and generated about 10wh of energy for charging. Although the amount of power is barely enough to charge 2 handphones, we wanted to deliver the message that energy is precious resource, and harvesting energy from routine activities is both necessary and convenient.

I don’t know how you feel, but I feel Maker Faire is like a new year’s day to me. This is the time when I look into the past and check what I’ve achieved. I would say the best thing I did last year was to step out of my room and participate in many community events, also made a lot of friends. For the blog site I wrote 6 new articles, of which some are quoted directly or indirectly by Hackaday, Dangerous Prototypes, freetronics, or other sources. My site has accumulated 36,942 visits, averaging 105 visits/day as of 2014, increased from 55 visits/day of 2013. This year is of tremendous fun.

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Being not too much dedicated to Arduino, I have to quickly put up something demo-able. And since I’ve been playing with display devices often, I decided to make an Arduino graphics project. After two weeks, I finished my first Arduino game — FlappyDuino (thanks SG Makers William Hooi for inventing the name).

The project hardware is really simple. It only contains an Arduino Pro Mini, a ST7735 SPI TFT panel and a distance sensor (Sharp GP2Y0A21YK0F, which I used before in Project Crystal). I have put the KiCAD schematic, PCB and Arduino sketch code at https://github.com/baoshi/FlappyDuino. Feel free to download and criticise my code.

Lazy me also think a video is worth thousands of words.

Happy Birthday Arduino!

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Make the story straight. The Atmel ISP connector combines SPI bus and RESET signal. SPI is used for downloading program, and RESET implements Atmel’s “debugWire” on-chip debug system. debugWire OCD is a very fancy protocol that uses only one RESET pin to debug. ATmega328p supports debugWire, and hence the ISP connector on Arduino UNO can be used for debugging. Arduino Micro uses a newer ATmega32U4 chip. Surprisingly debugWire is missing from the product datasheet, instead JTAG is listed. JTAG uses 4 I/O pins,  from Arduino Micro schematic we can see the JTAG pins (TDI/TDO/TMS/TCK) are multiplexed with analog pin A0-A3. It appears I have to sacrifice these analog pins for the JTAG interface.

JTAGICE3 comes with a 10-pin JTAG header, with the definition as follows:

All I need to do is to make an adapter connecting these pins:

The actual construction is done on a perf board. I made it Arduino “Shield” type so they can be simply stacked together.

I admit it looks quite dangerous when stacked up

I hook up JTAGICE3 and choose JTAG interface in Atmel Studio. And no surprise. Murphy gets me everytime! “[ERROR] No JTAG devices detected.” is the only reply I get. I Scratch my head several hours then to realize how stupid I were. Since the pins PF4-PF7 have been used as analog inputs for Arduino, how can JTAG establish connection with these pins! And the resolution is simple: connect using ISP header and enable the JTAGEN fuse bit. Now I feel the usefulness of ISP connector.

I can finally talk to ATmega32U4 using JTAG and do some debugging. The coming year will be interesting

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Designing a proper USB powered device is no simple task, this is because:

1. If the device needs more the 100mA current, it is only allowed to draw that amount after requesting from host during USB enumeration. Some USB hosts, for example the down stream port on a bus-powered USB hub, is only able to provide maximum 100mA. So the device must be intelligent enough to differentiate the host types.
2. USB sleep mode current limitation must be considered as well.
3. I also wish the device to operate autonomously without a PC. That means it must accept power from “dummy” USB hosts such as a USB charger.

Clearly point (3) conflicts with points (1) and (2) because USB charger cannot be enumerated and does not have sleep mode. And this is why I’m interested in FT230XS’s “USB charger detection” function.

A thorough test is still needed. According to the datasheet, FT230XS supports detection of battery charger which conforms to the USB BC1.2 specification. AFAIK many USB chargers, notably those made by Apple, are not BC1.2 compatible. Whether FT230XS can detect those chargers is not specified in the datasheet.

A quick background about USB power supply and USB charging: the original USB specification limits the USB downstream current to 500mA (after enumeration).  However 500mA is too low to charge battery powered devices such as a smartphone. BC1.2 was then specified, which introduced “Charging Downstream Port (CDP)” and “Decicated Charging Port (DCP)”. A DCP internally shorts “D+” and “D-” together. When DCP is detected, the device may draw as much as 1.8A from the port. Identification for CDP is much complicated and outside the scope of my interest  (because I have no CDP compliant host), more readings can be found here.

While looks simple on paper, the actual USB charging situation is much more complicated. Reason being that USB charging specification came too late and vendors have been inventing their own charging protocols. Notably:

1. Apple has been inventing USB charging protocol since iPod days (check out the hardwork here). The charger’s capability is identified by the voltages on D+ and D- lines, as:
   • (D+,D-) = (2.0V, 2.0V) -> 500mA (iPod charger)
   • (D+,D-) = (2.8V, 2.0V) -> 1A (iPhone charger)
   • (D+,D-) = (2.0V, 2.8V) -> 2A (iPad charger)
2. Chinese standard YD/T 1591-2006. Which is basically the same as BC 1.2, shorting D+ and D-.
3. European smartphone charging standards says a 200Ω resister must be connected in-between D+ and D- to identify a charger.

FT230XS is very easy to use. I made a simple testing board using a SSOP-16 breakout adaptor. The contact was was plucked from a USB header and glued to the breakout adaptor. Chip under test is FT230XS, Rev D, date code 1243.

I further mount the adaptor onto a breadboard and connect 3 LEDs onto the CBUS pins. The configuration of the colors are:

• Yellow – BCD#, should light up when charger is detected.
• Red – PWEN#, indicates required power negotiated.
• Green – SLEEP#, should light up when USB enters sleep mode (host suspend).

The chip is programmed using official FT_Prog utility. Power required is set to 500mA. I would skip all the testing procedures and note down the results here:

Testing with PC USB port

Scenario 1. Connect to a PC USB port when PC is running: Green LED (SLEEP#) lit up then all LEDs turn off shortly. Windows start to find driver. Red LED (PWEN#) lit up when Windows starts to download driver from Windows Update. Red LED stays on after driver installed.

Scenario 2. While FT230XS still connected, put Windows into sleep mode: Red LED (PWEN#) off and Green LED (SLEEP#) lit up, indicating sleep mode.

Scenario 3. Resume windows: Green LED off, Red LED lit up, indicating power enable.

Scenario 4. Unplug FT230XS, put Windows into sleep mode and plug the FT230XS: Red LED off, Green LED lit up, indicating sleep mode.

Scenario 5. While FT230XS is still connected, shutdown PC: Green LED still on, indicating sleep mode.

Scenario 6. Unplug FT230xS, shutdown PC and plug FT230XS back: Green LED lit up, indicating sleep mode.

Testing with PC USB through a self-powered USB hub:

Same as previous results.

Testing with PC USB through a bus-powered USB hub:

Unfortunately all my USB hubs report themselves as self-powered even if they are not. I had to modify a hub into bus-powered. Bus-powered hub can be identified in Windows Device Manager as:

Scenario 1. Connect to bus-powered hub: Green LED (SLEEP#) lit up then all LEDs turn off shortly, Windows show the following message. All the LEDs stays off. It shows that Windows failed to configure the device because the USB port cannot supply enough current (500mA).

Scenario 2. While FT230XS still connected, put Windows into sleep mode: Green LED (SLEEP#) lit up, indicating sleep mode.

Scenario 3. Resume windows: All LEDs turn off.

Scenario 4. Unplug FT230XS, put Windows into sleep mode and plug the FT230XS: Green LED lit up, indicating sleep mode.

Scenario 5. While FT230XS still connected, shutdown PC: Green LED stays up, indicating sleep mode.

Scenario 6. Unplug FT230xS, shutdown PC and plug FT230XS back: Green LED lit up, indicating sleep mode.

Test with USB chargers

I tested 4 different chargers, as shown in the picture

Scenario A, plug FT230XS into a USB power adaptor from TPLink router (D+/D- shorted). Yellow LED (BCD#) lit up, indicating charger detected.

Scenario B, plug FT230XS into a USB charger for amazon Kindle (D+/D- shorted). Yellow LED (BCD#) lit up, indicating charger detected.

Scenario C, plug FT230XS into Apple iPhone charger (5V/1A), Yellow LED (BCD#) lit up, indicating charger detected.

Scenario D, plug FT230XS into Apple iPad charger (5V/2A), Green LED (SLEEP#) lit up, indicating sleep.

Scenario E, since I do not have a Apple iPod charger (my iPod charger is Firewire charger), I connect FT230XS to 5V supply and supply D+/D- with 2V from voltage divider. Green LED (SLEEP#) lit up, indicating sleep.

Scenario F, Connect FT230XS to 5V power supply (floating D+, D-), Green LED (SLEEP#) lit up, indicating sleep.

Summarize the findings, here is the result matrix: (On means asserted)

So the verdict? I need more intelligence from FT230X  for proper USB power management

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This is the second year of the event and the venue was relocated from the remote (to me) Science Center to Singapore’s busiest Orchard area. And it is free entry for all

If anything would dominate the theme of the whole faire, that is 3D printer. This year we see less MakerBots, more self-built devices.

The huge printer “B.O.B” by romscraj (http://romscraj.com). Its gigantic metal frame makes every other printer looks like a toy. But it is not printing by the time I reach there. Printing huge object will take a long while, I guess…

An unfinished wooden 3D printer (mill? laser cutter?) silently sits beside a MakerBot Replactor 2, but certainly catches more attention. The wood framework is as sturdy as it looks. The booth is within the Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) platform, nobody was there at the moment, pity

This is the first time I saw the “Rostock Delta 3D” driving mechanism. Watching the three step motors running mad to keep the extrude platform flat == nerd porn.

Singapore Academy of Young Engineers & Scientists (SAYES, wonderful name) brought us ultrasonic water purifier. It (supposedly) uses high power ultrasonic wave to break dusts. The water in the photo may not look clear at the moment but half minute before a handful bunch of sands were just dropped in. BTW it effectively cleaned by glasses as well

Mood indicator by Media Lab LASALLE. It aggregates twitter messages and trying to detect sender’s mood by indexing keywords. A map is then plotted showing the mood of the people around the world. Is Singapore the world’s unhappiest nation?

Temperature recorder by the same Lab. It has integrated temperature sensor (of course), a GPS module and a dial letting people to choose if they feel cold/cool/perfect/warm. The data are then aggregated to map the temperature across the island. Very practical crowd sourcing application.

This Soundscape application (available on Andriod Market) creates 3D sound effects. Its bigger speaker brother (to the left side, sorry for the truncating) further demonstrates highly directional capability, definitely great for public events so the neighbours can stop complaining. These young startups has a website http://www.immersivesoundscape.com/ Please do checkout their cool inventions.

You will never see shortage of Arduino on a Maker Faire. This Email prank thingy contains an Arduino and a WiFi shield. It sends out an automated email when the button is pressed. May I have email notification when my coffee is ready?

Talking about coffee, these two coffee machines brew super strong coffee without electricity or hot watermark. Everything back to nature (future?).

This piano staircase leads up to the stage. But the sound is too weak to attract much attentions. How about a 100W Class-D Amp next time?

For the Arduino community 3E gadgets has brought in the little lovely TinyDuino board. Within the tiny 20x20mm square a full Adruino Pro Mini (ATMega328P/8Mhz) equivalent circuit is setup. There are also bunch of tiny shields available so user will have no difficulty to deal with the miniature connector. Another good news to the Makers here in Singapore is that 3E Gadgets is now an official distributor of Adafruit Industries. That means we do not need to pay the $8 mailing fee and wait extended days to get hands onto Adafruit products!

This is the second year I met Mr Jolyon Caplin. He is demonstrating a remote controlled toy excavator. With his modification this $80 toy almost became a robot dancer!

And as usual his signature light rods. Talking about the circuit, it is powered by an old school PIC16F84 (still available in Simlim Tower :-o) Getting most out of a chip is definitely the art of electronics design.

If Ian of Dangerousprototypes is the celebrity last year, this year we have Bunnie Huang. He gave a talk “Singapore better than United States for hardware makers”. Full report of his talk is here.

I shall end this post by introducing this wonderful lady engineer Michelle and her projects at AIS CUBE.

With a team of 2 they managed to implement a BASIC virtual machine inside PIC32 micro controller, together will a full development platform named “Sonata”. This is a tremendous meaningful project that opens the door for kids to learn electronics. I would compare it with the Raspberry Pi project, but this is much more low level yet easier to hand on.

And yes I’m the lucky bastard who grabbed one of these tiny twik^2 dev boards. At first glance it contains a PIC32 MCU, a 3 axis accelerometer  and a tiny RGB OLED screen (which is nice!) Please expect more to come about this little board.

Final words:

The maker movement definitely increases the talent pool. It is true even in a crowded island like Singapore where everyone is busy making ends meet. I hope those who sitting high above can hear it. Instead of bring talent in, why not incubate own talents? (quote from Bennie)

PS: No Raspberry Pi this year, why?

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I made an inquiry on Dangerous Prototypes forum asking for an ideas about how to make a test jig for the panel. Less than a hour later I received a replay from matseng. He suggested me to use pogopins to make a jig. And Ian also showed me a photo of test jig he bought from Shenzhen. And then started my journey to make a poorman’s version of test jig.

I defined the specification of the jig as:

1. As minimalism as possible.
2. Can plug into breadboard.
3. Incorporate all necessary circuitries for the panel including 13V VCC supply.

I used to jump into making stuffs without much planning, and it resulted in tons of junks under my collection. So this time I try to design everything first. Thanks to the Chinese new year holiday I had a luxury of time to spare. And here comes my final design.

With proper 3D sketching I’m able to design the PCB with precise hole positions. The schematic basically contains a DC-DC boost controller (based on LT1930, story later), some passive components and pin headers. To save space I try use surface mount components this time, hence it poses higher demand for MF70 pcb milling.

I also cut two acrylics, one for the base (left) and the other the guide (right) for solder pogo pins.

With the guide I’m able to solder the pogo pins straight.

Assemble everything together, the pogo pins seems nicely fit onto the gold contacts of the OLED panel

The panel uses SSD1305 controller. It is similar to the commonly seen SSD1306 but with some additional functions (I will update these in future blog). As for now, I simply modify on top of Adafruit’s SSD1306 Arduino library.

And IT JUST WORKS.

P.S.

About LT1930: My initial choice of DC-DC boost converter was LT1613. The reason why it was choosen is that I found a taobao.com dealer sells LT1613 at RMB2 (<$0.3) per piece. I though it was a bargain and grabbed 10 pieces from him. They come in cutting tapes like original. But And not surprisingly it does not work. I admit I only tried 2 of them but the failure rate is already 20%. After much despair I ordered some LT1930 from proper channel. Supposedly it is pin-to-pin compatible with LT1613. Finally it works. Phew!

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