An Interview with Ian Lesnet - Bus Buccaneer Builder

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For those interested, there is now a transcript available for episode 125.

Welcome, Ian from Dangerous Prototypes!

•  Ian created the Bus Pirate and was later convinced to start selling it while he was a contributor to Hack a Day.
• It and all the other Dangerous Prototypes parts are sold through Seeed Studio, in Shenzhen China.
• All Dangerous Prototypes hardware is OSHW and is not released under a license. They consider it to be public domain.
• Ian got re-started on hardware while in grad school working on Berkeley Smartdust (with TinyOS), which was not user friendly at the time.
• These days Ian has been travelling to many of the Maker Faires around the world and showcasing the marketplaces and the hackerspaces nearby on YouTube.
• He recently interviewed Mitch from Hackvana about navigating the Shenzhen supply chain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlbC9GSv5jY
• Ian has a made presentation about how to get your open hardware manufactured, based on a talk given at Maker Faires and elsewhere http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifTaGRTPwLc
• The PIC24 has programmable pins for reassignment after layout. Convenient!
• The Bus Blaster is a product that allows you to debug your JTAG chain.
• The ATX power supply breakout board turns your old computer supplies into a low cost bench supply!
• If you'd like to get a case for your designs, you can now use the Dangerous Prototypes standardized "Sick of Beige" Case, based on their standardized board outlines.
• There is work done for the open source USB stack, since USB stacks have a sketchy history http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pegVYODsn4
• The 7400 Series Logic competition was a success this year, but may be put on hold for a while. Next year might be a test equipment design competition!

Thanks again to Ian for stopping by the show! If you're interested in learning more about the company or contributing, stop over to Dangerous Prototypes. You can possibly even pick up a free PCB!