Category Archives: Tutorials

FOR DECEMBER 13: Nick’s mixed signal fpga board AND COMMUNITY BOARD PROJECT STATUS

The normal meeting format will be followed (welcome new attendees, announcements, problem/design review of the month, presentation, community project status, show and tell). This month’s presentation will be by Nick Edgington of Edgington Labs. Nick will share details of a very inexpensive line of mixed signal FPGAs (initial breakout board coming from OSH Park). Additional meeting time will be devoted to the status of the TriEmbed Community “Espressif 32 bit processor board + FPGA(s)” development board project.

September 11 Meeting Recap

  • Announcements
    • Sparkcon starts this weekend with “Geek Expo of Maker and Digital Arts” back at the Redhat Annex on Saturday from 11am to 5pm. And this just in. Adam and Dan will be there with this stuff:

      Maniacal Labs @ Sparkcon this Saturday: they’re back!
    • Raleigh Mini MakerFaire is September 23rd. Splatspace will have a learn to solder booth and other things to share. TriEmbed is passing this year but multiple folks will be attending with handouts.
  • Problem of the Month
    • Paul presented his “counting pushups” problem and gathered ideas submitted by the attendees
    • Details of past problem solving sessions are available via the “Problem of the Month” main menu above.  Or here.
  • Home Automation Presentation
    • What can we say? Ben stunned much of his audience, especially during the Q&A.
  • Show-and-tell
    • Paul gave an update about his power over ethernet development project and his ongoing wrestling match with 802.3AF.
    • Alex presented his “leg movement logging via accelerometer using European Data Format” project using a Teensy USB and open source tools and custom Python code. He gave everyone a great accounting of a typical development project based off open source starting points and got the final results he was after. The GitHub repository for his project is here.
    • (No notes were taken: if you contributed something please drop a line on the email list so this can be back-filled!)
  • General discussion and final questions

Archive of past meeting slides, videos, code and design files

SMD Soldering Demo @ Triangle DIYBio Popup


Today until 2pm is the second day of an open house of the area Triangle DIY Biology organization near Scrap Exchange in Durham. I was button-holed to “do something” at this event and decided the easiest thing to demonstrate would be how to hand solder fine pitch SMDs. TriEmbed info sheets are on hand and we’re also plugging SplatSpace. I’m using a little space at the popup to coordinate curation of Fred Ebeling’s Collection of electronic parts at SplatSpace.

December 12th Meeting: Better than Blinky

blinkinglightsfromgoogleimagesPaul MacDougal will talk about alternatives to the classic Arduino beginning program and shares this summary:
“Blink is a great first example for Arduino programming, but a really bad example of embedded programming. With 99.9{13079d06258ef9010cea88dee32f3cdfc6f216a54651010f7303ce6140ee927c} of its time spent in delay(), nothing else can happen. This talk will show how to rewrite blink in several different ways to allow it to play nicely with other functions.”

Join Paul and others at NCSU for the regular meeting. More details on the “at NCSU” meeting page.

For the August 10th Meeting: Electronics Tutorials & A Bench Test Instrument

This month’s meeting will be at  NCSU Centennial Campus Engineering Building III:    Meeting Details

The August meeting will be in three parts:

  • Ohm’s Law Modeled With Fluid Flow by Ryan Schuster
  • Transistor Tips by Shane Trent
  • A Programmable Bench Test Instrument Oriented Toward Power Measurements by Chip McClelland

The last part of the meeting will be the usual open forum. Bring your show and tell items, problems needing help, etc.