Meeting 20100422

Makerspace Agenda/Meeting

• Makerspace intro (5 min)
  • anyone new, please introduce yourself!
• Makerspace business (15 min)
  • Earth day recap
  • hand out flyers to those @ the meeting - please pass them out or put them up!
  • budget: no change since last week
    • current funds: $4000 of $6000
    • current members: 17 (+2)
  • dues: sign up on the website for recurring donations
  • What You Can Do:
    • call the owners of buildings you see to find out the monthly rate, lease terms, and square footage!
    • post flyers
    • tell your friends and coworkers
    • drop a note on any relevant mailing lists, forums, or news groups you're on
  • past events
    • Earth Day
    • National Robotics Week
    • I think at this point the fashion will have happened, so we can talk about that too.
  • upcoming events
    • Hackerspaces Call-in - Sunday, May 2, 2010, 3pm-4pm (CDT).
    • Richardson Wildflower Festival - Friday, May 14, 2010, through Sunday, May 16, 2010.
    • DFW Dragon Boat Festival May 16. No booth or table available; we will be performing some aerial photography and possibly distributing some fliers
    • Next Meeting: Half Price Books on Northwest Hwy (still waiting on clearance from HPB, Ed coordinating ) Company|Dallas again probably

Minutes

Presentation

Microcontrollers and More: A Survey of Boards

Ed and Steve will provide a quick survey of available boards that you can use to develop embedded software for. We'll talk about the pros and cons of several of the boards including:

• cost - how much are you willing to spend?
  • $10 - kits, super barebone microcontrollers
  • under $50 - microcontrollers
  • under $100 - small arm systems
  • under $200 - things with decent networking capabilities
  • more than $200 - computers
• size
  • "stamp" sized
  • "name badge" sized
  • "cigar box" sized
• power requirements
  • USB powered - 2.5 watts
  • netbook - about 10 watts
• CPU "horsepower"
  • 8 bit or 32 bit
  • microcontroller or minicomputer
• expandability and/or IO capabilities
  • direct digital IO
  • commodity interfaces: RS232/RS485 serial, USB
  • card slots: PC/104, PCI/104, PCI
• how easy is it to download programs?
  • commodity stuff - plug in your thumbdrive
  • serial boot loaders
  • JTAG adapters
• how easy is it to set up a tool chain?
  • out of the box, provided by vendor
  • online (!)
  • the hard way: DIY the whole thing
• what is the cost of any development tools required?
  • JTAG adapters
  • proprietary compilers
  • proprietary libraries (usually licenses for libraries for some linux boards)
  • free/none required

• Specific boards to pass around
  • Qwerk
    • hardware details
    • embedded linux system with ethernet, wifi, motor controllers and other IO
    • no longer for sale
  • BeagleBoard
    • hardware details
    • embedded linux system with DVI video and USB
    • available for $150
  • Pololu Orangutan
    • family comparison
    • "larger" of the Atmel Atmega system with LCD and motor controllers
    • $60 - $150 for the better ones, depending on what accessories and pre-assembly
  • Diamond 486 PC/104
    • older PC/104 computer
    • PC/104 description - a form factor for ISA bus computers
    • no longer for sale
    • PCI/104 - a similar idea for PCI systems
  • VEX PIC-based controller
    • Microchip PIC
    • $150 for a new one
  • standard Arduino
    • a minimalistic Atmel development board with on board bootloader and robust programming libraries and support
    • many choices for variety of prices $10 (kits mostly) to the $65 Arduino Mega
  • NXP mbed
    • ARM cpu with support chip for USB Thumb Drive-style programming
    • optional online compiler and IDE
    • $60 from Mouser.com
    • LPC1768-based
    • LPC2368-based
  • miniITX and nanoITX
    • x86-based small form factor commodity motherboards
    • usually not much direct IO
    • USB, serial ports, VGA, sometimes a PCI card slot
    • store with a selection of miniITX boards
    • store with a selection of picoITX boards
  • a host of small embedded wierdo systems that are probably good for a one-off project
    • shiva(?) plug
    • gumstix
    • linksys NSLU
  • a host of repurposed wireless routers
    • forget all of them except the WRT54GL
    • goes for about $70

break out for discussions (no limit)

Attendees