As alluded to teho Labs is getting out of the low cost development board market at least for now.
As of today sales of the ARM development boards are being halted.
teho Labs will continue to be a source of information and projects, so feel free to check back in.
I have ideas for no less than 5 major projects at the moment. With the completion of my PhD there may actually be time to complete major projects again in the near future, so I hope to show off some interesting in early 2013!
Hello everyone. I thought I would take a moment to give you guys the scoop for the plans for teho Labs. I know this year as been horrible for updates.
We live in a golden era for micros, you guys out there have a lot of choice of development boards and good ones at that.
While my development boards remain excellent value compared to the official Ti ones, we now have a lot of choice in the ARM space that we didn’t have when I started releasing boards way back. As a result I’m not going to make development boards the focus of teho Labs going forward.
Instead the focus will be tools. This was always part of the plan. Eridani was actually designed to be a GPIB controller, but when I polled the community I found few people who knew what one was! Since then there was a thread at dangerous prototypes that showed that some folks did need one after all…
Nevertheless, tools are certainly the name of the game going foward. FPGAs, uC, and lots of analog probably. I have designs for lots of analog stuff in the works, but what I can release, how, and when will depend on my employment going forward. Analog design requires more care and knowledge to do well.
I also may move to a fulfillment model like dangerous prototypes uses once I can absorb the cost of possible failures or establish a good revenue stream to fund the lab.
Changes are coming. Things will be settled and headed in the new direction before the end of the year.
We have had a number of requests for board files, but never felt comfortable releasing them because the KiCAD libraries they are based on were rather messy.
It is likely the old projects will never be released in full open format simply because we don’t think the board files would make any sense to anyone else.
To solve this issue, we have started new KiCAD libraries with some standardization on how things are named.
They will be updated to match the latest project that is released.
Essentially there are two classes of parts through hole (TH) and surface mount (SMD). There are two flavors of parts standard footprints (SOIC8, 0603 things like that), and not standard.
Therefore there are 4 libraries. If a part isn’t known to be standard it will go in the non-standard library. Most parts will have a default package for PCB-CV, other packages may exist but you are advised to check the pinout if you don’t use the default package
The non-standard part naming convention is:
partType_vender_partNumber
e.g. opamp_Ti_OPA350
CPiLD is a CPLD board for Raspberry Pi, it also has an I2C buffer chip.
I would say the major points are:
The board is based on XC9572XL in a 64 LQFP package.
Check the docs section for a port of the XSVF player for Raspberry-Pi and more detail on the board.
The default image for the CPLD is a SPI bus expander buffer. It buffers all the I/Os and adds 8 inputs and 16 outputs.
If you think you would want one, leave a comment. If there is enough interest there will be a kickstarter for them.
I ordered a Raspberry Pi back in March (or was it the last week in Feb.) the day it was put on sale via Newark. I actually did it while I was at a conference. After what was a rather lengthy wait, it arrived just about 3 months later.
To be honest Beaglebone is more open source than Raspberry-Pi, it is also faster probably at least for general purpose stuff. What it doesn’t have though is HDMI on board or a price point of 35 dollars. You’ll need a 10 dollar SD card also so really 45 dollars is what a R-Pi costs to deploy.
For some things having real time access is more important for that Procyon and the ARM boards I build are better. They have a lot of resources and can do complex things like FLAC decoding, and they have pretty high memory bandwidth for a single task, again taking Procyon as the example it does 50 MB/s to SDRAM.
However, not having to do much but download a package of some complex library is a lot easier so I fully expect R-Pi to become the dominate internet electronic project gateway device for the DIY community.
I will likely be doing some add on boards for R-Pi, so stay tuned.
If you want some more of my thoughts on R-Pi in relation to use and hardware check out my post on Dangerous Prototypes’ forum.