Short answer: At least until 2017, maybe forever. I'm teaching freshman engineering at Tufts University this fall. In conjunction with my efforts at raising a 3-year-old, this means the Rascal is on hold. Long answer: First, a quick summary of the history. I started the design of the original Rascal…

The upper deck on the Rascal 2 will have a Freescale Kinetis MK20 processor on it, so it can act like a Arduino, or a Teensy 3.1, or a Fadecandy. (The Teensy 3.1 uses the same chip, and the Fadecandy is almost identical, but with slightly less memory.…

Working with embedded Linux boards like the Raspberry Pi, or Beaglebone, you will fairly quickly realize that the hardware is far more polished than the software. It's not too surprising-- the boards are sold with the expectation that you will program the board to make it do what you want.…

Most of my time in the last few months has been devoted to developing the radiation monitoring system mentioned in the last post, but in the gaps, I've made some progress on the Rascal 2. The image below shows what is mostly a mechanical prototype. The bottom PCB is nearly…

There's been radio silence over here at Rascal Micro headquarters for the last few months because of three all-consuming projects: The new design for the Rascal 2. A radiation monitoring system for a lab at the University of Texas. My wife and I have a rather young daughter. It is…

(Background: I'm building a manual stencil printer for applying solder paste to circuit boards. The hardware design will be open source. There are more details in the first post about my stencil printer.) After a couple of failed mechanism designs, the first working iteration of my open source hardware stencil…

I try to assemble as many Rascal Micro products as I can myself here in Somerville. The Rascal itself has a ball-grid array processor, which is really hard to assemble reliably by hand, but simpler stuff I can handle. For my Precision Voltage Shield, I assembled the first one by…

The Rascal has been a steady seller over the last 2 years, but it's time for a hardware upgrade! Same philosophy, more reach When I designed the original Rascal in 2010-11, the explosion of small ARM Linux boards (Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, and the like) hadn't happened yet, and there were…

As the Rascal has matured over the last few years, I've started to think about how it can change the working lives of artists and scientists. The Rascal is already a useful tool for people who have some experience with web programming and basic electronics, but I'd like to see…

When I talk to people about the Rascal, they often ask about the differences between a Raspberry Pi and a Rascal. Summary: if you want the cheapest possible computer, buy a Raspberry Pi. If you want to control some Arduino-style hardware from your web browser and you're a busy person,…