Hasta La Gadget!

For electronics hobbyists, the open source chipset BeagleBoard that packs as much punch as a smartphone processor might seem like the key to paradise.

Yet it is the relatively underpowered 8-bit microcontroller Arduino that has captured the attention of DIYers.

Arduino began as a project in Italy in 2005 and since then has turned into an open source hardware movement. There are thousands of Arduino projects today such as electric meters, guitar amplifiers and Arduino-based gadgets that can tell you when your plants need water.

The Arduino community is at least 100,000 users strong.  But it is not alone.

Other open source projects like the BeagleBoard, which is shepherded by Texas Instruments, are trying to win Arduino fans over.

The Beagleboard is a low-power, single-board computer, whose latest version is based on the same 1-GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor that drives the most sophisticated smartphones today. That gives it far more processing power than the Arduino. Yet the BeagleBoard hasn’t hit the same kind of chord with hardware hackers that the Arduino has.

“The BeagleBoard is not for a novice,” says Phil Torrone, senior editor at Make magazine and creative director at Adafruit, a company that sells DIY electronics and kits. “With an Arduino, you can get an LED light blinking in minutes.”

Fundamentally, BeagleBoard and Arduino are two different systems: The former is a single-board computer, while the Arduino is just an  8-bit microcontroller. The BeagleBoard-xM includes a 1-GHz processor, on-board ethernet, five USB 2.0 ports and 512 MB of memory.

What they do have in common is that both represent possibilities: the potential to use your technical and creative skills to make a concept come alive.

Here are five reasons why the Arduino is more popular than the BeagleBoard:

Starter Projects

Editing and rewriting is often easier than writing from scratch. It’s the same with electronics. It’s easier to mod an idea than start with a blank slate.

That’s where the BeagleBoard falls short. “It has virtually no example application that you can just copy and hack to learn from,” says Massimo Banzi, one of the co-founders of the Arduino project.

The Arduino has hundreds of projects and ideas that are cooked up and shared by its users. For instance, check out this list of 40 Arduino projects that includes ideas such as a Wiimote-controlled Espresso machine, a biking jacket that flashes a turn signal and a wireless electricity monitor that tweets your power usage.

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem for the BeagleBoard. Unless there are more example codes out there, it is difficult to draw in the audience. And without the audience it is challenging to get enough sample projects into the community.

Cost and Durability

At $30 a piece, an Arduino is an inexpensive investment for someone who wants to try it out. “It’s the price of a few sandwiches,” says Torrone.

Compare that to the BeagleBoard-xM, which costs $180.

One reason why the Arduino is so cheap is because it is easy to clone. The microcontroller is completely open source so the “components are all commodity,” says Torrone.

With the BeagleBoard, hobbyists don’t have the same amount of freedom. They have to work closely with Texas Instruments or its partners, says Torrone.

Arduino is also very resilient. Drop it, smash it and it still stays alive. Add to that its low-power requirement, and the product becomes a must-have for DIYers. An Arduino can run on a 9V-battery for days.

“The BeagleBoard is fast and powerful but that also means lots of energy is needed, which makes it difficult for simple projects,” says Torrone.

A Thriving Community

Arduino’s popularity means it’s easy to get started. Companies such as Adafruit, SparkFun and Liquidware not only sell chips, but they also host blogs that suggest ideas on how to use your Arduino while providing extensive project plans to guide you in completing your creations.

Will Chellman, a student who has played with Arduino for years, says he’s now experimenting with the BeagleBoard. But finding documentation and information to work off is not easy, he says.

The lack of well-documented projects done with the BeagleBoard can be intimidating to new users as well, says Banzi.

“There’s lots of of interesting stuff (about the BeagleBoard) but it is very technical,” he wrote in a comment recently on Gadget Lab in response to the launch of BeagleBoard-xM.

Banzi says BeagleBoard documentation is also scattered and fragmented.

“Parts of it have aged and you spend quite a bit of time jumping from wikis to mailing list to track which specific bit of documentation applies to your board, bootloader etc.,” he says.

Maturity Is the Key

Arduino has had a head start on the BeagleBoard. By October 2008, about 50,000 Arduino boards had already been shipped. That year, the first BeagleBoards started making their way into the hands of hardware enthusiasts.

“The BeagleBoard is just two years old. Since it hasn’t been around long enough, there’s not enough people building apps based on it,” says Chellman.

That’s not to say that BeagleBoard isn’t catching up. Earlier this month, we showed five projects ranging from a videowall to the iPad of ham radios that use the BeagleBoard. There’s also a build-your-own tablet kit that is based off the BeagleBoard.

If DIYers take a shine to it, expect to see more ideas like these.

Simple Is Attractive

With its single-board computer configuration, 1-GHz processing power and the choice of accessories, the BeagleBoard is a creative engineer’s dream come true.

But the same reasons make it intimidating to those who want to geek out on a DIY project but don’t have the technical know-how.

Arduino users point out that it is simple to connect external sensors to the board, and the example codes out there make it easy to get started quickly.

Arduino is a simple system designed for creative people with little or “no prior knowledge of electronics,” says Banzi. “It’s cheap and open source with lots of documentation written in a not too technical language. Above all, it has a very welcoming attitude towards beginners and tries not to scare them too much.”

Photo: pt/Flickr

See Also:

• BeagleBoard Gives New Power to Open Source Gadgets
• Build Your Own Tablet for $400
• Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?
• DIYers Get a Treat With Top 40 Arduino Projects
• Android Phone Grows Up, Becomes Brain for Real Robot

With its weird reception troubles that seem to be triggered just by touching it, the iPhone 4 is like Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “It could get wrecked, stolen, scratched, breathed on wrong… a pigeon could shit on it! Who knows?”

The best solution so far seems to be Apple’s Bumper case, a $30 strip of rubber that wraps around the steel antenna band and stops your clammy hands from sucking out the signal. But it’s $30. Because of this, Oliver Nelson decided to make his own Bumper from one of those cheap rubber bracelets found pretty much everywhere, or by donating to a charity.

The case is as simple as it could be. Just find yourself a bracelet (look for one measuring “about 1.125-inches long and about 0.125-inches wide”) and stretch it around the outside of the phone. Oliver also made a few cut-outs so he could reach the headphone jack, the dock connector and the mute-button. Done, and you just saved yourself around $29.

In fact, Oliver saved himself the full $30: his bracelet came free, bundled, somewhat ironically, with an iPad charger. Still, even if you pay full-price, its likely that the money will be going to a good cause, and not into Apple’s pockets.

DIY: Ghetto iPhone 4 case from a 99c bracelet? [The iPhone Guru]

See Also:

• IPhone 4 Loses Reception When Antenna Band Is Touched
• Apple's Response to iPhone 4 Antenna Problem: You're Holding It …
• Can Black Tape Double the Speed of Your iPhone 4?

It’s only been a few days since the launch of iPhone 4, and there have already been an alarming number of stories of people dropping their iPhones from heights small or large, and shattering the back panel of the phone. Luckily for them (and you), there’s a simple solution: sugru.

Instructables has a video and instructions for how to apply four small bits of a material called sugru to the corners of your phone to make it much more drop-friendly. Sugru is a silicon modeling clay that adheres to almost anything, and in this case can be used to make your iPhone sturdier, bouncier and much better at handling the moment when you get out of your car with your phone on your lap and fling your brand new iPhone onto the street. Even for non-droppers, the sugru keeps the iPhone from rubbing against whatever surface it’s sitting on, which will do wonders to keep it from getting scuffed and scratched.

Sugru corners for your iPhone will cost just under $10 for materials, and only a few minutes of time to put together. It’s not the most attractive of solutions (the sugru corners look a little like clown noses, which I can only assume would be another viable way to protect your iPhone), but it’s much better-looking than a shattered iPhone.

(Photo: Courtesy Instructables)

If you’re not sold on the iPad and are tired of waiting for tablets from other PC makers to show up, try getting your hands dirty with a tablet you can build on your own.

Liquidware, an open source hardware company, is selling a $400 tablet starter kit. The DIY tablet targets developers who want to create a tablet of their dreams or write specialized software applications.

“The Beagle tablet is a portable modular open source handheld computer,” says Justin Huynh, director of product development at Liquidware. “It’s all about customizability and embedded development.”

The tablet kit contains a 4.3-inch OLED touchscreen that mounts directly on a BeagleBoard. The BeagleBoard is a single board computer from Texas Instruments that comes with a 1-GHz processor. There’s also a battery module and a 4-GB pre-formatted SD card to boot Angstrom Linux. But users can also run the Android operating system on it, says Huynh.

“Everything is modular and snaps on or mounts directly on a board so you have a very compact tablet-like device,” he says.

Since Apple iPad’s debut in April, tablets’ popularity has surged. Apple sold 2 million iPads in just 60 days of the product’s launch. That has left other companies scrambling to introduce tablets of their own. Both Samsung and Research In Motion have tablets in development. In the U.K., Dell has already introduced its first tablet called Streak, a 5-inch PSP-sized device that can also make phone calls.

But those gadgets have little appeal for tinkerers, says Huynh.

“With the iPad, you would have a hard time hacking it to read from a specialized sensor such as a temperature sensor or add your own custom hardware,” he says. “The Beagle tablet is all about innovation.”

Since the Beagle tablet doesn’t have any storage beyond the SD card, it is extremely lightweight, weighing just about 8 ounces. Users can increase the size of the SD card or plug in an external hard drive or a solid-state disk through the on-board USB port.

The battery life of the Beagle tablet can vary from three hours to six hours depending on the application, says Hyunh.

The Beagle tablet is a lot of work since you would have to load everything from an OS to different applications. But once you get it going, it could be a better conversation starter than the iPad.

See Also:

• BeagleBoard Gives New Power to Open Source Gadgets
• Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work?
• Open Source Hardware Hackers Start P2P Bank
• Open Source Hardware Project RepRap Creates its First Circuit
• Hardware Hackers Create a Modular Motherboard

Photo: Liquidware

This is only a how-to in the loosest sense. The step-by-step instructions would read thus:

1. buy a zip-loc bag and a business-card stand from the stationary store

2. Put the iPad inside

But the surprise is just how amazingly well this combination works, alone or apart. Here’s the video:

The first surprise is that the iPad’s screen will still accept touch input through the plastic when otherwise isolated from the steam, spills and oily haze of your late-night burger-frying sessions. This will let you read, play music or do pretty much anything else as your patties sear and then rest to achieve a perfect medium-rare pink (yes, I’ve become obsessed with Serious Eats’ A Hamburger Today column, okay?)

The bag I used is a little dimply, but you could use a thinner, smoother (and free-er) invoice bag from FedEx and you’d get a better contact with the screen. At 70 cents for two, though, I’m not complaining about the ones I have.

A bigger surprise is that the sound is actually better when the iPad is safely ensconced within the bag. Well, louder at least. There is a small but easily perceptible volume boost, presumably caused by the sound booming around in the bag. This is very handy when trying to hear an audiobook over the hiss fresh-ground chuck steak sizzling in a cast-iron skillet.

As you can see in the clip, the bag is waterproof. Although I wouldn’t trust the zip-loc enough to actually submerge the package, it is clearly able to cope with spilled beverages and spitting pans (if you’re wondering, the video playing is the un-aired and frankly quite creepy pilot for Big Bang Theory).

The acrylic business-card holder cost me a little more – €7, or just shy of $9 – but it is sturdy and makes a very good and very tough iPad stand. I use it without the zip-loc bag as a desk-stand. Despite the sturdiness of its support, it has a small footprint, ideal for my little kitchen.

There’s certainly something about the iPad which encourages this kind of DIY approach to accessories, like our good friend John C Abell’s doorstop hack. Perhaps it’s that nobody has quite figured out a use for it yet, so we’re forced into custom solutions.

If you use your iPad in the kitchen, try out the zip-loc solution. No longer will you fear damaging your tablet as you melt creamy, sharp Cheddar-cheese onto a juicy pink hamburger and crack open an ice-cold bottle of beer. Is anyone else feeling hungry?

See Also:

• Wired Bureau Chief Builds iPad Stand from $6 Doorstops
• The $5 iPad Dock
• Video: Neo Keyboard Hooked up to iPad