EP#50: The FX Development Board has landed!

Podcast Notes

• 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 Confernece 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
  • 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!

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