SMD November – Build your own Bus Pirate v3 LTS

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SMD November is all about building our own Bus Pirate v3.  The bus pirate v3 is a like a leatherman for electronics protocols.  “Talk to 1-wire, I2C, UART (async serial), SPI, JTAG, MIDI, LCDs, PC keyboards, and a ton of generic serial devices from a terminal.”  In SMD October workshop we showed you can program AVR processors with it too.  The web is full of stories of people rescuing laptops and reverse engineering all kinds of devices using bus pirates.

The original design is open hardware, we’ll be using it with a custom PCB design, also open hardware – I’m calling it LTS (for learn to solder).  The schematic is the same but the PCB uses a much bigger board (50×100) and replaces some of the tiny components on the production model with 1206 components that are much easier to solder.  Eagle design files are at https://github.com/vhs/vhs-pcbs/tree/master/bus-pirate

There are some very fine pitch parts on this board, help will be available to solder them but you’ll need a steady hand and a fine tipped soldering iron.  This workshop is more expensive because of the ICs on this board but still good value.  Once again, I’m leaving the evenbrite fee out in the open rather than absorbing it.

If time permits we’ll also cut some Sick-of-Beige cases on the laser cutter to suit your new tool (as shown in the photo).

The PIC microcontroller on this board will be supplied blank.  There will be programming facilities at the workshops to bring the board to life with the bus pirate firmware.

VHS needs members so I’ve decided to make this a members only event.  I may drop this requirement if ticket sales are not sufficient.   Please don’t buy a ticket if you aren’t or don’t intend becoming a member.  I’ll verify the list of attendees with the vhs membership guru the night before and contact anyone I can’t find on the members list.

This will be the last SMD workshop this year.  If you have a request for the next SMD workshop, please contact the organiser. I may consider revisiting the October workshop next January but with a real Leonardo PCB and then following this up with some shields to match in later months (or go straight to some shields?  Let me know).

When : November 28th, 2013 7:00pm and December 5th, 2013 7:00pm
Where : VHS 270 E 1st Ave, Vancouver
Tickets : Eventbrite - SMD November - Build your own Bus Pirate v3
Cost : $19 for pcb, parts and instructions (eventbrite will add $2 or so)
Bring : solder iron (preferable) and magnifier (preferable)