If you want to try your hand at surface mount soldering, this is a fun project that can be completed in a couple hours with a decent soldering iron and a pair of tweezers. The instructions aren’t perfect (I had to short across the PCB pads for D1 and D2 to get my programmer to talk to the AVR, and at the moment you have to install Eclipse to compile the hex file) but I am confident that these minor issues will be fixed shortly!
I just uploaded version 1.1 of the Arduino sketch, which fixes an issue with garbage being printed in the serial monitor between burn cycles. I also made some minor changes to try to reduce the likelihood of getting serial gibberish upon opening the monitor window, although I’m not 100% sure what is causing this. The sketch was compiled and tested with Arduino 0017.
I have verified that the shield works with the Atmel ATmega328P AVR microcontroller.
Nine close friends built Conway’s Game of Life kits from Adafruit Industries. This is my favorite kit for these kinds of workshops because it’s easy for beginners to complete in about 2 hours, and when everyone is done, you can wire all of the kits together to create one large cellular automata display. The last time I helped people build this kit was at a Make:SF workshop at the TechShop in Menlo Park.
The capture interval was 5 seconds. I used Quicktime Pro to stitch the images together at 15fps and iMovie to add titles and music (Turbo Outrun by FRP from remix.kwed.org.)
I wore my Halloween costume for most of the afternoon. What am I? Most people on the streets of San Francisco had no idea…
Safety first!
Stuart was the first to finish his kit:
Soldering the kits together to form the matrix:
Nine happy kit-builders with the 3×3 matrix they created with their finished kits:
And lastly, a video of the 3×3 matrix in action:
Three people had little to no soldering experience at the beginning of the afternoon. Everyone who came went home with a working kit. Success!
Good news! The AVR HV Rescue Shield kits are back in stock, with new, lower pricing!
The full kit, which has been reduced to $19, includes a professionally made PCB with preassembled DC-DC converter and all the parts you need to build the AVR HV Rescue Shield.
The PCB-only option is still available, which includes one unassembled PCB (DC-DC converter is not included). Pricing on the PCBs has been reduced to $6.
Back in March, I released the AVR HV Rescue Shield, my first open source hardware kit. The AVR HV Rescue Shield is a high voltage parallel mode fuse programmer for Atmel AVR microcontrollers.
Since then, I’ve sold dozens of kits around the world.
If you bought a kit, I want to hear from you! Specifically, I’d like feedback on the following items:
Was the kit easy to assemble? Are the assembly instructions clear and easy to follow?
Are you satisfied with the kit? Does it work as advertised?
Have you modified the kit or Arduino sketch in any way, such as adding support for more AVRs or programming modes?
Have you taken advantage of the Open Source Hardware model or CC-licensing to re-use this design in a new and interesting way that you’d like to share?
You can leave feedback in the comments below, or if you want to respond privately, use the contact form to contact me directly.
webcam on an Eee PC 4G running 
