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!

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.

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

I would say the major points are:

• 5 volt tolerance
• breakout to breadboard
• I/O expansion
• Interface conversion (e.g. SPI to I2S)
• education: learn HDL or logic circuits

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.

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.

Since everything still is manually moderated, this creates work. To help the situation comments have been closed on all the old posts. If you need to talk about one of them be sure to write using the contact form!

There are things cooking, but I’m not ready to talk about them yet. Stay tuned, it shouldn’t be more than a few weeks before I can give more details.

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.

For those who don’t know teho Labs is currently a one man operation. As a result my free time and how much can be done for teho Labs are intimately linked.

This is going to be a very busy year for me (I am finishing my PhD), to help with my overhead I am going to stop free Fridays for at least the time being.

All of the designs that are available for sale will remain available and as time permits new ones will be added. The same goes for projects such as openHiFi and tehoLogistics.

The very early alpha quality means crashes are almost certain, but you can get the feel of what the project is like with the software.

The software is open source and available on gitHub, there is also a wiki page where further documentation will be added.

The following screencasts explain the program goals/design and how to use it. Viewing full screen at 720p is recommended for readability.

Finally there is a discussion thread available for this project on Dangerous Prototypes.