The FX Development Board has landed!

January 13, 2017 Hosted by Parker Dillmann, Stephen Kraig

On this Episode, Stephen launches the FX Development Board and Parker finally settles on conference room names!

  • Continuing from last weeks discussion of the two conference room names at MacroFab HQ.
    • Emmett Naughton on twitter says: Conference Room A: The Hertz Locker and Conference Room B: The Thunder Ohm.
    • Parker is making plaques for the conference room doors now out of PCBs.
  • Space Echo Update! Last week Parker and Stephen asked for some clarification on some old school audio measurements so they could calibrate the Space Echo.
    • Steve Kuehn a self proclaimed gray beard from Austin says the following. 0 dBm in the audio business refers to voltage level that will produce 1milliWatt into a 600 ohm load. But over the years, it refers to a voltage level even if you are not aren’t using a 600 ohm load so it is a little of a misnomer. If you do the math, 0 dBm is the same as 775mVrms sine wave signal source. -50dBm would be 2.45mVrms.
  • FX DEV BOARD IS LIVE!! Check out the Crowdsupply page and get one! See Figure 1!
    • Dual solderless breadboards
    • 2.1 mm dc input jack for use with AC-to-AC wall wart
    • +/- 15 volt @ 200 mA power supplies with over-current protection
    • +1.25 to 9 V @ 150 mA adjustable power supply
    • Split voltage rail (1/2*9 Volt Rail) @ 15 mA for use as a virtual ground
    • User selectable power supply or 9 V battery
    • User selectable power supply connections to breadboard
    • ¼” input and output jacks directly connected to breadboard
    • “True bypass” switching to automatically switch circuit on and off
    • Multiple integrated potentiometers
    • Useful diagrams and tables written directly on silkscreen
  • Amazon Echo Kill Switch by Sparkfun
    • ALEXA KILLSWITCH. See Figure 2.
    • Build a power switch for the Amazon Echo that can be activated from a voice command
    • The idea is simple: you say a particular phrase, such as “Alexa, trigger kill switch,” which activates an IFTTT applet that calls a function on the Particle Photon. The Photon controls a transistor that cuts power to the Echo.
    • To turn it back on, you’ll need to press the button on the breadboard or create another IFTTT applet that causes the Photon to reconnect the power.
  • Arduino powered Honeypot
    • A honeypot is a device meant to attract/pre-occupy hackers, by providing something like a red herring to them; in this case, a system which looks and feels like an ancient bank credit card processing gateway from the 1980’s… complete with slow-speed 1200 baud, and uppercase-only text.
    • To see it for yourself, just use PuTTY (or actual telnet) to m80.ddns.net, port 23.
  • Peeqo – Robot that responds with gifs
    • Best IoT “companion” robot of all time.
    • Screen on the front with eyes. Has a complex animatronics inside for movement.
    • Ask it to do tasks and it will respond with a relevant gif and act accordingly if it feels like it.
    • Build Log!

Hosts: Parker Dillmann, Stephen Kraig

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!