David Pottinger Design a journal blog

Bus Pirate v3.8 Build

17 Dec 2015

So I won a raffle at dangerousprototypes.com. This lead me building one of these:

My Bus Pirate build (side)

I think it turned out pretty good.

Here’s a link to the Bus Pirate v3.8 page: http://dangerousprototypes.com/2014/01/21/pcb-drawer-restock-bus-pirate-v3-8/

Before I got started, I found some bill of materials for the previous Bus Pirate v3.6 and changed the USB connector to micro B. I forget if the FTDI part was on Mouser or not but for whatever reason I got it after the other parts. Mostly common sense stuff.

I had an ICD3 at work, so I thought I could skip the bootloader firmware. Turns out this isn’t possible! I needed the bootloader for the thing to work. I got all worried about FTDI drivers and reflowing the parts and thinking the baud rate might not be right. For posterity, something about the bootloader is necessary to be on there, then you go back through the USB interface to load the (in my case) BPv3-frimware-v6.1.hex file. You can get that when searching for Bus Pirate firmware.

After that and the normal assembly stuff, the hardware test went swimmingly.

My Bus Pirate works!

I was playing with it a little with a random sensor from Adafruit. I’ll have to write up instructions for using it so I’ll remember.

First Post

16 Dec 2015
Hello, World!

I’ve never written a blog before. It has to start somewhere, doesn’t it?

What to expect

Basically, the motivation for starting this is to share some images of things to get more things. DangerousPrototypes has such an offer for their prototype PCBs, also the DirtyPCBs service (same people?) has similar coupons if the result of one of those projects is shared on the internet.

As I’m working on something, I’ll want to share it on the internet to get coupons for the next thing.

I guess I could’ve used Twitter or Facebook or something for this, but I wanted to learn about GitHub more.

There are other reasons for blogging too. I’d like to share pictures of projects with people. I might treat it as a kind of journal. Sites like Hackaday have unsatisfying options for uploading BOMs for projects. Also it might be a useful self-management kind of tool.