This tiny sensor board was solely designed by Mike Rankin, a friend that help me to bring life to a real custom GPS board. This time he was looking for a multi purpose board to develop anything.

Sensor Board Main display Side Showing Ponglock

Feature list:

• I2C Bus to save pins for future use.
• 128×64 OLED I2C Display: let’s draw anything
• Momentary switch on left and cross plus center buttons on right (total 6 input buttons)
• Arduino Leonardo based: USB for anything.
• Temperature sensor (I2C)
• Barometer sensor (I2C)
• Accelerometer sensor (I2C)
• Real Time Clock (I2C) plus backup battery.
• Switched power supply.
• LiPo charger.
• Tiny design: let’s make portable projects.

Sensor Board Main Component Side

I couldn’t resist temptation.. I ported the pongclock code from Rob Parrett to this tiny board. Here is the result:

Hardware is open hardware, you can obtain anything on Mike’s web or you can buy it directly from Tindie. Custom pongclock code can be downloaded from here.

About 9 months ago one Hackaday reader dropped some comments about compiling the source I published here a year ago and some troubles. After that, Mike and me kept talking and things turn out that he was PCB developer, so we though we could make together GPS cube version for real.

Together we developed a schematic and Mike built all himself several prototypes until we finally came with a (almost!) final version. So, here we are, one year after first release:

GPS Cube version 2

This version has several features:

• Everything is packed together in a single board.
• Better GPS: we switched to MT3339 PA6H instead old SirfStar III EM-411
• We added TMP75 I2C temperature sensor.
• The display PCB is also custom to run 3.3v
• Everything runs 3.3v: GPS, display, FTDI, TMP75 and atmega328p is now running 8MHz, Battery lasts longer.
• Expansion header with SPI and I2C: the board ca be used as development board for any other projects with displays or GPS.

GPS Toy Hardware Rev1.0

New GPS Board back

All the hardware was designed and developed by Mike Rankin (probably will go to Tindie) meanwhile I developed the software.

.. and couldn’t resist to tear it down >:3

Ouya Video Game System

Ouya Teardown

Ouya main board

It’s body is metal built. It gives the console a robust appearance but the WiFi antenna is damn small, so the console is pretty much signal-deaf. Also the case air flow is bad: the console may heat up. I think basing it’s main OS on top of android is a bad idea, as android can (and is) heavy, leaving less resources to games. Also case is almost empty, not well used space.

BUT, is open source and hackable :)

Antes de que existieran los CCDs las imágenes se capturaban con tubos de vacío como este. El funcionamiento es el mismo que el de un tubo de televisión pero a la inversa. El haz escanea la superficie sensible que en funcion de la luminosidad crea una señal eléctrica en el anillo metálico que lo rodea. Esta señal es la que posteriormente se amplifica y se modula para su emisión.

Vidicon vacuum tube

En esta imagen se puede ver el interior de la válvula de vacío una vez que quitamos el cristal y la cubierta enrejada:

Vacuum tube teardown

En el interior se aprecia el ánodo, cátodo y 3 rejillas intermedias, de ahí que este tubo de vacío esté clasificado como Pentodo.