Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 22 he came up with TraId – Transistor type & pinout identifier: TraId is a really low cost version of the Part Ninja. It’s made to only identify the pinout and type (NPN/PNP) of a transistor and display the results on eight LEDs. […]
Author Archives: DP
Week in (p)review September 06, 2013
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon. Open Bench Logic Sniffer with OS X LPC1769 debugging with the Bus Blaster Bus Blaster v3, and Bus Blaster v4 back in stock Coming up: Free PCBs via Facebook on Friday App notes on the weekend Free PCB Sunday […]
ATX Breakout board bench power supply case
Here’s another cool acrylic case for the ATX Breakout board bench power supply by Phenoptix: A rather handsome pair of acrylic plates, just a bit bigger than the ATX Breakout boards from Dangerous Prototypes. The design is heavily influenced by Seeed Studios product but we couldn’t find the files to just copy it directly. Our files are […]
DIY laser cut cable carrier chain
Here’s a DIY laser cut cable carrier chain project by Martin Raynsford: I’ve been looking at cheap laser cutters quite a bit recently. Most of them are missing air assist and red dot positioning, these features require wires to be run up to the laser head which means running cables around the moving parts. These drag chains […]
LPC1769 debugging with the Bus Blaster
Alvaro wrote a post on his blog detailing how to debug LPC1769 with the Bus Blaster: After getting the gcc-arm compiler working with the mbed, I decided to take a look at my LPCXpresso LPC1769 development board. The mbed is really easy to program. It mounts as a flash drive and you just drag and […]
Open Bench Logic Sniffer with OS X
microtherion writes: While trying to debug a High Voltage Parallel Programming experiment and trying to get an idea of the state of the 15 or so signals involved, I decided I had outgrown the ability of my Bus Pirate (which works quite nicely as a logic analyzer, but is limited to 5 channels, 4096 samples […]
Yet another semiconductor V/I curve tracer – I
Kerry D. Wong writes: Semiconductor curve tracers were frequently used in analog circuit designs many decades ago, at a time when discrete semiconductor devices were in dominance and ICs were scarce. While curve tracers are no longer widely used nowadays due to the ubiquity of digital circuitry and computer aided designs, they are still quite […]
#FreePCB via Twitter to 2 random RTs
Every Tuesday we give away two coupons for the free PCB drawer via Twitter. This post was announced on Twitter, and in 24 hours we’ll send coupon codes to two random retweeters. Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week: Hate Twitter and Facebook? Free PCB Sunday is the classic PCB giveaway. Catch […]
Interfacing the ADS8328 to an MSP430
juani_c has written an article detailing how to interface the ADS8328 to an MSP430: The ADS8328 is a high-speed, low power, successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that uses an external reference. The ADS8328 has an internal clock that is used to run the conversion but can also be programmed to run the conversion based on […]
Bus Blaster v3 back in stock
Bus Blaster v3 JTAG debugger is back in stock at Seeed Studio.The cool thing about the Bus Blaster is that it uses a programmable logic chip as a buffer. It can imitate different types of programming hardware with a simple USB update. You can get a Bus Blaster v3 for $34.95.
Nibbler 7400 4-bit custom CPU update
Steve at Big Mess o’ Wires posted an update on his Custom 4-Bit CPU: Enough with the vague design talk – here’s the circuit schematic for the Nibbler 4-bit CPU! Click the image to zoom in to a full size view. For simplicity, this version omits some details like bypass capacitors, clock generation, reset circuitry, etc. The […]
Stripboard I2C Logic level converter
Tom posted picture of his I2C Logic level converter project in the forum: A very easy logic level converter to translate I2C signals from, say, a 5 V Arduino to a 3.3 V slave device. Via the project log forum.
Free PCB Sunday: Pick your PCB
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. Our PCBs are made through Seeed Studio’s Fusion board service. This week two random commenters will […]
App note: digital constant current power LED driver
Here is an app note from Microchip describing how a PIC12HV615 MCU can be used to implement a digital current control loop for power LEDs: This document describes a power LED driver solution using the PIC12HV615 microcontroller (MCU). The PIC12HV615 is an 8-pin MCU with many integrated analog features. The LED driver circuit is a […]
Bus Blaster v4 back in stock
Bus Blaster v4 JTAG debugger is back in stock at Seeed Studio.The cool thing about the Bus Blaster is that it uses a programmable logic chip as a buffer. It can imitate different types of programming hardware with a simple USB update. You can get a Bus Blaster v4 for $45.
Computer aided dispatch in a box
Kenneth Finnegan has been working on computer aided dispatch project: For these events, we usually have several dispatchers on different frequencies, and then build an entire computer network around them so that they can use a local HTTP-based computer aided dispatch (CAD) system to pass and log information. The problem is that there are a lot of […]
Audio clip player
Here’s a simple audio clip player by Paul of Dorkbotpdx: The hardware is pretty simple. It’s just a Teensy 3.0 that “plays” the audio using a PWM pin. The PWM is amplified to a 9V signal using a NPN transistor, then a pair of transistors buffer the signal to the current required to drive an 8 ohm […]
Free PCB coupon via Facebook to 2 random commenters
Every Friday we give away some extra PCBs via Facebook. This post was announced on Facebook, and on Monday we’ll send coupon codes to two random commenters. More PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday and the blog every Sunday. Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times every week: Free PCB Sunday. The classic. Every week, get […]
Week in (p)review August 30, 2013
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon. Bus Pirate LCD adapter v3, Bus Pirate v4, Logic Sniffer 16-bit input buffer wing, and Bus Blaster v4 are back in stock XC95144XL CPLD breakout board free PCB build Check out Rwinscot’s ISP2DIP, Tom’s I2C LED Display from Hacked Voltmeter and exapod’s PIC based wirst watch in […]
PIC32mx based drum machine running in jam mode
Matt posted an update on his drum machine with a new 32bit PIC and a new larger LCD we covered previously: My initial prototype was based on a fairly common PIC available in DIP format, the PIC24FJ64GA102 which has 64kb of flash and 8kb of RAM. As I started to build up the firmware I quickly found myself […]