Bitgood.org

I spent so much time setting it up, I forgot to mention it. I created a store to sell the ZIFduino at bittyware.com. Only two boards have sold so far, but I haven't advertised at all. A naked board sold to the person I assume is running the Fundamental Logic store. They make a teeny tiny version of the Arduino. Whether it's to put it to use, curiosity or checking out the competition, they never got back to me to let me know.

A full kit sold to a rocketeer who goes by Tweeks. He'll be using it for programming chips to handle telemetry and and ejection controller in his rockets. Sounds pretty damn cool. He put together a great instruction page at theweeks.org/rockets/2008-06_ZIFDUINO.

I took a good long look at the traces on the prototype, and decided it's just too ugly to unleash upon the world. I ripped up everything and did it all by hand. It looks much nicer now, and I've been able to reduce the vias to four (there used to be 45!).

You'll notice there's a change in the name. That's because there's a new board in town...

The report that was supposed to be released on the Joint Forces Command website on Wednesday afternoon was for some odd reason NOT made available. They were going to post it on line and email it to reporters, then have a background briefing with the authors. Instead, they decided they were only going to mail it on CD to those that requested it. Something about it being "too politically sensitive." I couldn't imagine why that would be.

Well, I got a copy of it, and you can get it right HERE. Being a government document released to the public, it is in the public domain. If any DMCA takedown notices are sent to my provider they are invalid, and the submitting attorney is knowingly committing perjury.

As with any type of branding, using the name Arduino or any derivative of it (like ZIFduino) on an Arduino-like project requires permission, especially if it's going to be a commercial project. I just heard back from the Arduino team, and they've given their blessing for me to use the name ZIFduino for the upcoming kits, along with some nice comments on the project in general. I was also told they have something else in the works that looks to be a pretty cool thing for the community at large, but I'll wait until they make an official announcement before saying anything. I will say that I intend to participate.

The 1.2 prototype is a big success. I've gotten some good feedback so far, and the final version should be going out for production within the next several weeks. With some minor documentation changes this thing will be finished.

Apologies for the crappy picture...

As I suspected, the crystal was bad. I finally got the batch I ordered, and the board is working like a charm now. It can be programmed via USB, and all the pins are working as expected. Happy day.

When all the schools in the area are closed and the weather folks on the news say to expect upwards of 14 inches of snow between 5 am and 6 pm, wouldn't it be considered prudent to forget about your bottom line for once, think about the safety of your employees and shut your goddamned doors for the day?

Dumbasses.

I'm fairly serious when I mention I'm tempted to open my own shop. I walked into Radio Shack today and started digging around their woefully inadequate parts section when one of their staff came up and asked if they could help me find something.

Me: "Yeah, I'm looking for a 16 MHz crystal. Where would I find that?"

Them: "That's the thing that makes those radio scanners work, right? No, we don't carry that old stuff any more."

Me: "..."

They did, however, have green LEDs for a buck fifty each. To put things in perspective, the Jameco price is currently $0.088. Eight point eight pennies. Buy a hundred and you knock off a penny each.

100 green LEDs at Radio Shack: $150
100 green LEDs at Jameco: $7.80 + probably about $5 shipping.

Wow.

After looking around at all the shields people are making based on the Decimilia board, I decided it would be best to start over using that as a template. The goal here is to make a board that's compatible with what's out there so it's actually useful instead of being a novelty item. I spent all day trying new layouts and wrestling with traces, and I'm pretty comfortable with the result:

It's all put together, but after quite a bit of troubleshooting it looks like the crystal I used is bad. Of course I don't have another one on hand, so if the local Radio Shack doesn't have one I'll have to order it.

On a side note, It used to be that you could head on down to the local Radio Shack and get what you need. They were even out of a good number of fairly common resistors last time I went. Wish me luck...

Every time this kind of thing happens I get closer to opening my own store.

Update update...

Cheater over at the Arduino forums reminded me that I was being stupid. In all that effort, I spaced out the fact that the ATmega168 has an internal oscillator. After setting the right fuses to tell it to use the internal clock, it works just fine until I get around to replacing the crystal. The only drawback is it won't communicate with the Arduino programming software via USB until it's fixed. Good thing I just got my hands on an AVR programmer.