FreeBird News, Arduino, Ktechlab
FreeBird News, Arduino, Ktechlab
2007-11-22T10:29:39
Work on FreeBird has been stalled for some time - I am attending to a few other important personal matters - and, I will not be able to participate in FOSS.IN. FreeBird is creating a few spin-off's. The FreeBird-Mini will be a cheaper version based on Atmega processors. I am designing a small single-side PCB for an Atmega8 board using gEDA - the design will be released once the board is tested OK - I plan to write a small tutorial which will help beginners use gEDA to create finished products. Check out Arduino - it's a simple AVR experimentation board - the schematic is freely available. It's amazing that these people have been able to sell 10,000 of these boards! Another demonstration that you can definitely make money with Free S/W and H/W! Even though the Arduino PCB layout is freely available, the local PCB manufacturer said he would not be able to fabricate it - some of the tracks were too close together and issues of that sort. That leads us to the necessity for having designs done using gEDA. Dive into the world of Free Software, and you will find plenty of great tools which are yet to come into the limelight. One such is ktechlab. Use it - you will be amazed! I asked a few students to add AVR support to the tool and demo it at FOSS.IN (together with my Atmega board) - going through tens of thousands of lines C++ code can be tough - so Krishnanunni is trying to hack up something similar (minus the circuit simulation part - which is *hard*) in wxPython!
Ebrahim
Sun Jun 8 19:56:12 2008
Please contribute back AVR support for KTechLab to the community!
Praneeth
Fri Aug 21 19:10:44 2009
Although an old blog post. The PCB's are available in India now and its pretty cheap now a days to get a prototype made.