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The Arduino Effect

09/11/2011
- Arduino
- ARM
- AVR
- Beagle
- Chipkit
- Cortex-A
- Cortex-M
- Development Kits - Electronics
- DSP
- FRAM
- Freescale
- Manufacture
- Mbed
- Microcontrollers
- MSP430
- PIC
- PIC32
- Power
- Programming
- Research Phase
- Robots
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Test
I’ve noticed an interesting trend recently. Forgive my lack of awareness if this has all been said before, but here it is: microcontroller chip manufacturers are making/supporting some very cheap development kits nowadays.
Maker Faire Singapore 2012

04/08/2012
- Arduino
- Batteries
- Chipkit
- Development Kits - Electronics
- Display & Lighting
- FRAM
- Mbed
- MSP430
- PIC
- Power
- Raspberry Pi
- RENESAS
- Robots
- RX
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Test
The DesignSpark team in Asia joined the Maker Faire this weekend in Singapore, first of the kind for the team. The Maker Faire was participated by a full room of enthusiatic art, craft, electronics,
Leaflabs Maple Dev Kit Review

31/10/2011
Sometimes you can get excited about a Dev Kit before you even switch it on, but can the Leaflabs Maple Board live up to my exportation's or will this just be another STM32 fail? So this last few weeks
Coming Soon to DesignSpark Blogs

25/11/2011
- ARM
- ARM Dev Kit
- Chipkit
- Development Kits - Electronics
- GSM
- Mbed
- PIC
- PIC32
- Power
- Robots
- Test
So over the last year I have been doing lots of reviews of development kits. Over the next year I’ll continue to do this here on DesignSpark and just wanted to show you some of the kit that is curre
bladeRF: a low cost wideband SDR transceiver

13/02/2013
With a 300MHz to 3.8GHZ range, 40MHz bandwidth, USB 3.0 interface and priced at only $400, it's hardly surprising bladeRF reached its $100,000 Kickstarter goal in under 8 days.
Pi Perspectives: Romilly Cocking (Quick2Wire)

22/03/2012
The Raspberry Pi has been a cause of such excitement that individuals, open source projects and companies alike have been developing complementary hardware and software.
Microchip - Microstick 16-bit MCU dsPIC33F, PIC24H Review

13/12/2010
With the likes of the Arduino and the mbed filling the hobbyist workbenches, Education and even into the work place what have Microchip got to offer as a competing product? Well in the summer of this
mbed NXP LPC11U24 Review

06/02/2012
- Arduino
- ARM
- Cortex-M
- Development Kits - Electronics
- Display & Lighting
- Ethernet
- FLASH
- Mbed
- Memory
- Microcontrollers
- PIC
- Power
- Robots
- Test
- USB (Universal Serial Bus)
There can’t be many people who don't know about the ARM mbed. This has been right up there with the Arduino as the standard for development boards for some time now. However over the last year we ha
Embedded development with EDP

01/02/2011
The RS Embedded Development Platform offers an alternative path to the engineering prototype stage of a project allowing quick and easy changes of processor at the time of initial design or for upgrad
My First mbed

13/10/2010
A few weeks back I a received the mbed dev kit from RS (Part No.703-9238), but it was only today that I got a gap in my work schedule to play with it.
Make your own walking, talking, living….robot

29/02/2012
- Accelerometers
- ARM
- Beagle
- Coldfire
- Communication
- Cortex-M
- Development Kits - Electronics
- DSP
- dsPIC
- Freescale
- Interconnect
- Manufacture
- Mbed
- Memory
- Microcontrollers
- PIC
- PIC32
- Power
- Programming
- Raspberry Pi
- Research Phase
- Robots
- Sensors
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Test
As I wrote this blog Raspberry Pi exploded on the scene taking everyone by surprise with the sheer volume of people wanting to buy it. Many readers will have to wait a while to get their hands on one so why not use the time to investigate rather more interesting projects than just writing games? How about giving a humanoid walking robot some Artificial Intelligence…
FTDI Morph-IC-II FPGA Development Module - Review

09/08/2011
Among the low cost FPGA development tools sits one name that we are all familiar with. FTDI who are well known for their range of interface chips, from USB to just about anything they are true a leade
Electronics design - First steps are getting smaller

10/12/2010
For anyone wishing to take their first steps into electronics design, things have never been easier. Technologies such as Arduino, mbed and TI's LaunchPad have made serious engineering accessibl
Featured Profile: John Boxall - Tronixstuff

29/07/2010
John Boxall (or tronixstuff as he is known on the community) is an Arduino specialist and blogger from Toowong, Australia with a passion for education and all things technical. John's blog is a
Old and New at Sci-Fi London 2012

10/05/2012
- Analogue
- Arduino
- ARM
- ARM11
- Development Kits - Electronics
- Display & Lighting
- FLASH
- H8
- Human Machine Interface
- Interconnect
- Manufacture
- Memory
- Microcontrollers
- PIC
- Power
- Programming
- Raspberry Pi
- Research Phase
- Robots
- Sensors
- SERIAL
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Test
A major highlight of a week of activity at the Sci-Fi London festival was the Horizon Spectrum event at the BFI Southbank celebrating 30 years of the Sinclair Spectrum 'home' computer. I attended the
Arduino Labs - Open for business

02/08/2011
Those clever people behind the Arduino have opened the door on their latest venture Arduino Labs .The purpose of the Lab is to allow the open Source community to contribute to the development of new p
DesignSpark celebrates it’s 2nd birthday this week.

02/07/2012
- Arduino
- ARM
- Chipkit
- Display & Lighting
- FRAM
- Manufacture
- Mbed
- PIC
- Power
- Raspberry Pi
- Robots
- Test
This week marks DesignSpark’s 2nd Birthday and here at RS we are extremely proud of what we have achieved so far. Since DesignSpark launched back in July 2010, we’ve had almost 2 million vis
ChipKIT Ethernet and Basic IO board Review - Microchip

04/03/2012
- 720
- Analogue
- Arduino
- Chipkit
- Display & Lighting
- EEPROM
- Enclosures
- Ethernet
- Interconnect
- LCD
- Mbed
- OLED
- PIC
- Sensors
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Switches
- Temperature Sensors
- Test
- USB (Universal Serial Bus)
Some eight months ago I had a play with the chipKIT MAX32. At the time I was not over impressed by lack of full Arduino compatibility but since then Digilent have now released the Ethernet board. As w
Google Groks Hardware

11/05/2011
Google's Android Open Accessory Development KitIt was only a matter of time before the mighty Google put a toe in the open source hardware waters, and this finally came about yesterday with the releas
Review of TAUTIC Boards

29/09/2011
TAUTIC Electronics LCC is owned and run by Jayson Tautic and specializes in Prototyping, design tools and gadgets for electronics design. Jayson is a popular figure in the social network and is often
LeoStick Dev Kit Review - The Tiny Arduino Clone

07/05/2012
- 740
- Analogue
- Arduino
- Development Kits - Electronics
- Interconnect
- PIC
- Power
- Programming
- RX
- Solder
- Test
- USB (Universal Serial Bus)
So there are lots of development boards out now. And since the introduction of the Arduino there are lots of clones around too which is good in my view. So this is what I have to say is the smallest d
TAUTIC - CPLD Development Board Review

14/04/2012
- Arduino
- Circuit Design
- Circuit Simulation
- Development Kits - Electronics
- FLASH
- FPGA
- Human Machine Interface
- Interconnect
- Mbed
- PIC
- PLD
- Power
- Programmable Logic
- Programming
- SERIAL
- Solder
- Test
- Verilog
- VHDL
There seems to be more and more people getting into FPGA design and development. There are some very cheap, sorry, low cost kits out there too. Right down in the low end starter kits is one new kit th
Microchips new MPLAB X and PIC32 Starter Kit running on Ubuntu

28/03/2011
This weekend I decided to push the limits of my own skills and Microchip and see if I could install MPLAB on Linux, then run and compile to a PIC32 Starter kit. I have never considered going along
BoardX Review - from Upgrade Industries

12/02/2012
Many of us sit and complain about how well products work, point out there issues and bad point but few spend time doing something about it. In this review I look at just such a product, designed by en
Use your Cortex in the ARM jungle

15/12/2011
- ARM
- Batteries
- Communication
- Cortex-A
- Cortex-M
- Cortex-R
- Development Kits - Electronics
- DSP
- Enclosures
- FLASH
- Freescale
- Manufacture
- Mbed
- Memory
- Microcontrollers
- Microprocessors
- MIPS
- PIC
- PIC32
- Power
- Reliability Testing
- Research Phase
- Robots
- Test
There was a time when deciding which microprocessor to use for a new project was pretty easy: there weren’t that many to choose from. Who remembers the Intel 8080, Motorola 6800 or the CBM 6502? The
NEW Microstick II Review - Microchip

05/12/2011
For some time now we have had the Microchip Microstick that I reviewed back in December 2010. Its a great little product and one I have used in anger over and over again when trying out new ideas. The
Papilio Gives You Wings | Review of the Papilio One Dev Platform

24/10/2011
- Arduino
- Development Kits - Electronics
- EEPROM
- FLASH
- FPGA
- Human Machine Interface
- Interconnect
- Memory
- PIC
- Power
- Programming
- Test
- USB (Universal Serial Bus)
- Verilog
- VHDL
Over the last few months I’ve been trying out a number of low cost FPGA development boards with the view to how easy new people can get involved. FPGAs and the languages like VHDL and Verilog are no
Xbee and mbed streaming live data

11/06/2012
I seen a few reviews now of devices like the Xbee and they never seem very exciting. So this is the first of a number of posts I'll be writing were you see me using the product. So let get started and
DesignSpark Birthday Special - Here's to my next 250,000 hits

03/07/2012
- 740
- Arduino
- ARM
- AVR
- Development Kits - Electronics
- FPGA
- Mbed
- PIC
- Raspberry Pi
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Test
DesignSpark is two years old! Really? So what? Why is the fact that some website being two years old is of any real interest to people and especially engineers at all? Well there are lots of reasons a
Seriality -- Connecting Arduino to a web page

29/09/2010
- Arduino
- Enclosures
- Microcontrollers
- PIC
- Research Phase
- SERIAL
- Test
I've been playing with a browser plug in called Seriality , to quote the project websiteSeriality is a serial connectivity browser plug-in that enables web pages to communicate with microcontrollers
Raspberry Pi Squared - Educating Kids

14/04/2012
- 740
- Arduino
- ARM
- Mbed
- PIC
- Raspberry Pi
- Solder
- Test
One of the key things the Raspberry Pi team have pushed is that this is a tool for education.
Raspberry Pi and Custard for Schools

12/01/2012
Ok, so this isn't a post about food! but it is a story about a recipe destined for success.Raspberry Pi is a low cost credit card sized ARM/GNU based single board computer that runs on a Linux Platfor
RS Components Tweet Racers Competition

31/07/2012
- Arduino
- PIC
- Power
- Test
RS Components are looking for any UK based engineers or hackers who think they'll be up for the challenge of designing a system, that will use the power of Twitter, to race two cars on a Scalextr
Raspberry Pi with an ancient ancestor….

19/04/2012
It’s extraordinary: the release of a new piece of computing technology has generated a huge wave of nostalgia for 30 year old kit such as the Sinclair ZX81, ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro.
New Arduino's , New Site ... New everything !

27/09/2010
- Arduino
- Ethernet
- Human Machine Interface
- Interconnect
- PIC
- Power
- Programming
- Research Phase
- Standards
- Test
It's all been happening at the World Maker Faire in New York over the weekend , Arduino have announced 2 new products (with a third about to be released)Arduino Uno - the Duemilanove replacement with
Please - Do you speak the I2C?

05/05/2011
- Arduino
- Communication
- Display & Lighting
- EEPROM
- Human Machine Interface
- Manufacture
- Mbed
- Microcontrollers
- PIC
- Resistors
- RS232
- RX
- Sensors
- SERIAL
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Test
There are many ways in which devices can talk to each other. There is good old RS232 or use TTL serial RX/TX, or SPI and even parallel communications. However when I started on a project nearly t
NetWorker - an advanced web server with a microcrontroller

13/04/2011
- Analogue
- Capacitors
- Circuit Design
- Communication
- Display & Lighting
- DSP
- dsPIC
- EEPROM
- Ethernet
- FLASH
- Functional Test
- GAL
- Human Machine Interface
- Interconnect
- Manufacture
- Mbed
- Memory
- Microcontrollers
- PIC
- PIC24
- PIC32
- Power
- Programming
- Research Phase
- Resistors
- RS232
- RX
- SERIAL
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Solder
- Test
- Trial & Evaluation
An Internet connection would be a valuable addition to many projects, but often designers are put off by the complexities involved. The ‘NetWorker’, which consists of a small printed circuit board
Hands on with a 144 core processor

16/07/2012
The GA144 from GreenArrays is a highly novel 144 core processor that combines high performance with low power consumption. This post covers initial experiences with breadboarding the GA144 and using t
Breaking Down the Barriers

25/11/2010
Taking, adapting and creating new electronics hardware designs just got a whole lot easier. I look at how the free pcb design tool from RS Components, DesignSpark PCB, is helping to lower barriers to
Arduino: An open source hardware success story

02/07/2010
- Arduino
- Manufacture
- PIC
- Programming
- Test
Last night I attended the Open Source Hardware User Group meet up in London. It's a regular free event where like minded people get together to talk about designing, building and using open so
So when will we get the Star Trek Tricorder then?

19/01/2012
- ARM
- ARM11
- Communication
- Cortex-M
- Development Kits - Electronics
- Enclosures
- Ethernet
- Human Machine Interface
- Interconnect
- Mbed
- PIC
- Power
- Programming
- Raspberry Pi
- Research Phase
- Robots
- Sensors
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Switches
- Test
A competition has been announced with a $10m prize for the first working medical tricorder. If you claim to be an engineer and don't know what I'm talking about, then may I suggest locking yourself in
A Treacle Tin Radiation Detector

28/05/2012
- Arduino
- ARM
- Assembly
- Capacitors
- Circuit Design
- Enclosures
- Ethernet
- GSM
- Manufacture
- Microcontrollers
- PIC
- Power
- Reliability Testing
- Resistors
- Sensors
- Serial Peripheral Interface
- Test
- Wireless
The OpenRelief project is building “open, modular information solutions for disaster relief”, and as part of which they're developing a range of network-enabled sensors. I offered to help out by p
Using the eZ430 Chronos with a Raspberry Pi

01/06/2012
- Accelerometers
- Communication
- Development Kits - Electronics
- Microcontrollers
- MSP430
- PIC
- Power
- Pressure Sensors
- Raspberry Pi
- Sensors
- SERIAL
- Test
- Wireless
- x86
The eZ430 Chronos development kit from Texas Instruments represents great value for money and provides a wristwatch with a wireless-enabled microcontroller, accelerometers and temperature...
Using an Arduino in a Production environment

05/07/2010
- Arduino
- Capacitors
- Circuit Design
- Display & Lighting
- Human Machine Interface
- LCD
- Manufacture
- Memory
- PCB
- PIC
- Power
- Resistors
- SERIAL
- Test
Introduction The requirement was to add a digital readout to an otherwise manually bend roller machine so that we could accurately monitor the amount of material fed into the machine. Th
Pi Perspectives: Jeremy Ruston (Federatial)

28/03/2012
Image © Nick J. Webb (CC BY 2.0)Jeremy Ruston is the inventor of TiddlyWiki and founder of software consultancy, Federatial Ltd, and gained his introduction to computing during those heady
Pictures from Arduino DevCamp

14/07/2010
- Arduino
- PIC
- Test
[video:http://www.flickr.com/photos/designsparkrs/sets/72157624364527951/show/]
Processing on the Raspberry Pi

30/07/2012
- Accelerometers
- Arduino
- ARM
- Development Kits - Electronics
- PCB Etching
- PIC
- Programming
- Raspberry Pi
- RX
- SERIAL
- Wireless
A look at getting the Processing programming language and IDE up and running on a Raspberry Pi, and example code working with the TI Chronos eZ430 development kit.Processing is a programming language
Processing + Arduino + Twitter + OAuth

16/09/2010
- Arduino
- PIC
- Programming
- Robots
- Test
When I saw the title of the blog post it was just too tempting ... having read it I now want to rush home and start trying it outThis blog looks at using Twitter & Processing together with a
My introduction into the world of #Arduino AND electronics.

11/12/2010
- Analogue
- Arduino
- Circuit Design
- Display & Lighting
- PCB Etching
- PIC
- Programming
- Test
Pi Perspectives: Kevin Murrell (National Museum of Computing)

26/03/2012
- Arduino
- Assembly
- Enclosures
- FLASH
- GPS
- Human Machine Interface
- Manufacture
- PIC
- Programming
- Raspberry Pi
- Research Phase
- Sensors
- Temperature Sensors
- Test
- Wireless
Kevin Murrell is Director of the UK's National Museum of Computing based at Bletchley Park. I caught up with Kevin and he kindly agreed to be interviewed, providing us with insights into how he starte