After several month working of Bee improvements, new PCBs for Jaluino Bee v2.1 have been ordered from SeeedStudio. Several other PCBs have been ordered as well: some more Mini-Crumboard, and a new shield, Mini-ProtoGrove. I’ll post more about all of this when I get PCBs and build new Bees. In the mean time, you can have more details in forums and pre-order PCBs:
This is a recurrent issue: “my SD card won’t work, I tried the sample, I triple check hardware, it just won’t work”. The main problem here it’s hard to get feedback and report it to jallib library’s author (namely Matt). Different issues were previously found:
When I designed first versions of Bee, I mostly used Sparkfun Eagle library, as an habit, and browsed eBay on the other side in order to choose components: one that’s available in Eagle and cheap enough on eBay. By this time, I selected a microSD socket Push-Push type:
These were easily found on eBay, at a decent price, I ordered 5pcs (~$5). Since then, these aren’t available anymore, alternatives sources are much more expensive, something like $3 to $4 per socket. This somewhat kills my low cost approach… Another drawback is pins are under the case, which make this part hard to solder, probably the most difficult one.
You may have heard about “Internet Of Things”, platforms mixing hardware and software projects to publish and share data accross the web. The idea is to have some hardware collecting data, and publishing it on a website. One successful example, open source & free, is ThingSpeak, used here in this post.
So, Jaluino Bee is cheap (~$10 if you build your kit yourself) and that was one main goal while designing it. A reason is the cheaper it is, the more you can put Bees as things in the internet. This is the idea here: collecting electrical consumption from a power device and publish it on ThingSpeak.
Flashing LED (between the two blue buttons)
This is a quick & dirty recipe to build Jaluino Bee v2.0 from a kit. Build your kit at your own risk, I’m not responsible for any damages, you’ve been warned. Twice.
Here we go.
Jaluino Bee gets listed on Dangerous Prototypes, post your best & fun project and win a Jaluino Bee board !
(but where is v1.0 ?…)
I’ve been working for several months by now on a new Jaluino board, Jaluino Bee. I’ve designed a first PCB (v1.0), tested it with more or less success and now have ordered (and received) a second batch of PCBs (v2.0). From all i could test it seems to work “out of the box”, so now is the time to expose this…
Cuckoo birds are brood parasites, they use other birds’ nests to grow their hatchlings. Mother Cuckoo carefully selects existing nests and puts an egg, only one egg per nest. When Baby Cuckoo hatches, most of the time before other eggs, it just pushes them out the nest. This is its very first instinct, probably not the most rewarding one… Adoptive parents are now only focused on Baby Cuckoo and feed it graciously, with profusion.
This gave me an idea for a new Jaluino family board…
Jaluino PCBs, directly coming from India thanks to Sunish, will soon arrive at destination (my home), from where they’ll soon be dispatched. This is the first batch order for Jaluino boards, very exciting 
Don’t do this, don’t read this, close this page, because what is following will break your Arduino board, it will disintegrate it, it won’t work anymore, you’ll just have to throw it away. Unusable. This is extreme Arduino, this is Forbidden Arduino. Do it at your own risk, if you completely and undoubtedly know what you’re doing, because I’m not responsible in anyway for anything that would occur before, while and after, for decades and decades. And much more.
This is not for the faint of heart.