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.
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.
Among the PCBs I got back was a version of BasicUART V2 that uses FT232RL in place of MCP2200. The previous version of this design had a problem with a zone not connecting to a GND pin, which caused it to be flaky at best.
I built up one last night and it worked nicely. I will get to updating the docs and producing a few of these in the near future.
Another design in the PCB batch was a high speed DAC conversion board. This board had some issues. First the footprint for the DAC chip wasn’t correct (I needed the wide version but used the narrow version opps!). Second the opamp circuit was unstable. I was able to hack fixes for both onto the PCB to do some testing. After the fixes the output was not bad at all. It still needs improvement and that will likely require another 2 PCB iterations for what I have in mind to really test fully.
MSPism got a minor tweak to its design, which looks fine but still needs to be tested. I have some firmware written for MSPism but it isn’t what I envisioned as the final features which is why it still hasn’t been released and put on sale. If you feel strongly I should just release what I have done, sound off.
The other boards have yet to be built up for testing of any kind. One of them is for a contract and the other is a new design, for an old idea.
No Free Fridays until the new year. The lab is closed for the Holidays. Have a great end to the year!