#oggstreamer – EMC compliance Report

With the help of EMV Consulting – we managed to test the OggStreamer for EMC compliance. We tested against EN61000-6-1:2007 and EN61000-6-3:2007 – the report of this measurement can be downloaded here.
Here a picture from the “secrete chamber” of EMC compliance 🙂

And another one from the ESD testing:

#oggstreamer – Lasermarkings Designfiles

The Design of the Laser-Markings was done using Inkscape and GIMP – Many thanks to my sister this way, who made the OggStreamer look proper. The font used in all of the Files is called Xolonium which is licensed under GPL special thanks go to Severin Meyer who designed this great font.

You will notice that only FRONT,BACK and TOP are drawn in Inkscape – thats because of the great number of Logos it was easier to draw the BOTTOM directly with GIMP – and we already new at this moment, that the CorelDraw wouldn’t open our SVGs.

here are the PNG

The whole process of Laser Marking was not really easy. One main reason for this was that Inkscape always exports Fonts Anti-Aliased … And opening the SVGs in CorelDraw directly didn’t work either. with Fonts Anti-Aliased exported we produced strange effects on the Laser, which apparently only uses Black and White as information … There was some trickery needed in order to get the Design done proper. We also tweaked the Bitmaps on Pixel-by-Pixel to get good results … So your millage may very if you want to use the PNGs from above.

Because the case was already anodized aluminum – and engraving already bright anodized aluminum results in poor contrasted, we needed to use special Transfer-Tape (CerMark LM6018) and Marking Paste (markSolid 904). The Transfer-Tape was used for the non-dense Designs (FRONT,BACK,TOP) – the Marking Paste was applied with an Airbrush for the denser populated BOTTOM.

the SVGs for FRONT, BACK, TOP can downloaded from the mcad-repository

#oggstreamer – EMC compliance test passed

yes – after a 13+ hours day of work – we passed EMC compliance testing :=) Actually it was not peace of cake – but with two minor adjustment we could meet the required performance criteria. Details and the associated report will follow in a few days.

Meanwhile some photographs of the finished Hardware:

I will try to finish a couple of devices during the next two weeks and start shipping 🙂

#oggstreamer – PCB oddities

continuing the Murphey’s Law topic … I want to present to you an oddity i discovered one single LED PCB (I checked 20 boards and only found 1 with this error).

Here you have a working and a non working version of this PCB – can you figure out the 2 mistakes?

Rather interesting what had happened here. Isn’t it? My guess is that the photo paint in the PCB production progress had some adhesion-problem . It slipped away and was “caught” by a nearby pad …

#oggstreamer – Murphy’s Law

Sometimes things go wrong – nothing unusual about this – especially when it comes to electronics design …

Due to an old erroneous file that was stored on the CNC-Punching machine this project delayed slightly. In detail we have two holes not punched into the right place. You can see on the picture below. The right part is punched correctly.

Unfortunately the mechanic guy punched all of the 60 pcs. this way – so we produced a whole lot of scrap aluminum. Meanwhile we ordered replacement parts from Hammond – the Hammond people were really helpful and we could order exactly the part that was punched the wrong way, instead of ordering 60 complete (4pcs.) cases. But it delayed our project for about 8 weeks (5 weeks shipping replacement parts – and some time to produce the correct panels). I also screwed up in the past – so i was not really pissed on the mechanics guy. He was also very eager to correct this mistake so i am personally quite happy that we now produced all the needed parts 🙂 – Nevertheless I want to express myself and do at least something with the screwed up parts so I composed the following picture:

#oggstreamer – graphics design finished

I just tested the graphics, which will be laser engraved in the final oggstreamers. For the test I used a transparency sheet and laser printed the graphics with 600 dpi.

The result looks quite promising – here it is: (sorry for the bad photo quality)

#oggstreamer – OpenHardware and open workshops as tools for experimental exploration of alternative economic models

If you are by any chance in Vienna on the 24th Feb. – I would like to invite you to a talk i am giving within the Solidarity-based Economy Congress 2013. I will be talking about the Open Technologie Labratory and the OggStreamer Project. The experiences from the past years and how these two project benefited from each other. The short description reads as follows:

OpenHardware and open workshops as tools for experimental exploration of alternative economic models

Field report and thought-provoking impulses from 3 years of work on two projects. The first project, called OTELO, aims at the installation of open workshops in rural areas. The second project, called OggStramer, is an electronic OpenHardware product. It was developed with the support of many friendly people within the OTELO Vöcklabruck, where it became a production-ready device. This development was made possible due to the OTELO framework, which served as space, network and source of inspiration. With this lecture we want to tell the story of these projects to show, that complex ventures (regardless their nature) are possible with the support of a community.

Date: Sunday, 24th Feb 2013 – Time: 11:00 – 12:30

#oggstreamer – STM8 UART Flasher for Linux

I just completed a rough Version 0.3 of stm8flash – a handy little tool that allows you to programm a STM8 over a serial uart interface (using the STM8 internal bootloader)

The software is based upon stm32flash written by Geoffrey McRae – many thanks to you that way. STM is using a similar Bootloader-Protocol for the STM32s and STM8s which made porting the flashertool not so difficult.

The stm8flash can be downloaded via sourceforge. It works as desired for my 32K STM8S105 device. But it is only designed to work with 32K devices so far. Also it is currently using the so-called “Reply” Mode, which is available on STM8A-128K, STM8S-32K, STM8S-128K and STM8L-64K. If you want to use this tool in non reply mode, then take a look at stm8.c and search for “REPLY” – it should be fairly easy to adapted to the other devices as well.

stm8flash also introduces a new flag “-d”, which stands for using the DTR-Line to trigger a device reset. (Arduino-Style 😉 )

Maybe in future somebody could try to merge stm32flash and stm8flash as the share a lot of common code.
What was really helpful for debugging the code and get the thing running, was a SALEAE Logic-Analyzer (with Software RS-232 decode functionality). It is definitely a powerful tool for such tasks.

Further this step just marks the first Milestone for the ongoing NetIdee-Project. 🙂

#oggstreamer – Supportforum for OggStreamer

I just opened an support-forum for the OggStreamer – feel free post questions and feature request.

I also encourage all of you who are interested in using this Device to describe your personal use-case.

Here we go: https://sourceforge.net/p/oggstreamersupp/discussion/

#oggstreamer – Production costs – a rough estimation

Here I want to give you an Idea – of how much the production of 50 OggStreamers costs.

The following calculation still leaves the following costs:

• NRE costs for soilder stencils
• NRE costs for programming of the pick’n’place machine
• machining of the case
• laser-engraving the case
• THT soldering
• Final assembly

all prices in EUR (without taxes)

PCB	550
Special SMD-Parts	1650
Pick’N’Place + Standard SMD-Parts	2400
THT Parts	1150
Linux-Module (XportPro)	2200
Sum	7950

thats roughly 200 Euros per Device (as a conservative Estimation) – a more realistic Estimation would conclude with apprx. 160 Euros per Deivce. – remember these are not the final production costs, because this calculation leaves out the above mentioned points.

The OggStreamer-Device started as a Hobby-project and evolved over time – it is an ongoing Experiment so to say – and it was never cost optimized. All our design decisions were carried out the way that we wanted it to be – we didn’t waste a thought about the economic feasibility of this project. 🙂 So it is kind of miraculous that we have come that far in this process. A pilot run of 12 devices was accomplished with the generous support of many friendly people and our supporters. And there is more to come we recently secured the sponsorship for the production of 50+ devices from the “Internet Foundation Austria” – who acknowledged the value of this Project and OpenHardware in general. The OggStreamer is now part of the “NetIdee 2012” sponsored projects.