Mincior made a tutorial on DIY double sided PCBs using vinyl stickers as your toner transfer substrate. We wrote about his vinyl sticker method in an earlier post, but this one covers synchronization between the two layers as well. This is a different way of making a double sided PCB, having one feature in common […]
Author Archives: DP
Email controlled Raspberry Pi dog treat machine
Give Judd (Visla breed K9) treats through emails, and get back a picture of him eating it. This is the idea behind the Raspberry Pi powered Judd treat machine. The Judd Treat Machine, as shown in the youtube video below, is a Raspberry Pi based dog-treat-dispensing machine! A combination of various skillsets (CAD, machining, fabrication, […]
Weller WX 2021 soldering station teardown
Presslab tears down the Weller WX 2021 soldering station. He is hunting for the pinout of the front panel serial connector. He was able to identify the serial IC used, and with it the pinout. Via the forum.
Bus Pirate v3.6 added to the Fritzing library
Fritzing is an open source GUI based program that allows users to document their prototypes, share them with others, show them in a presentation, and create a pcb layout for professional manufacturing. Mikhail added the Bus Pirate v3.6 to their parts library, and Systemstech made a quick sketch of it connected to the DS1307 real […]
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: Designing a simple isolated flyback DC to DC converter
Here’s’ a video tutorial from Linear Technology describing how to design a simple flyback DC/DC converter. The video promotes the use of LT’s LT3573 IC, but it also provides information that could be applied to other designs as well. Isolated power supplies are needed in a wide variety of applications. Galvanic isolation is achieved by […]
App Note: Differences between switch mode, linear, and pulse Li Ion battery chargers
Here’s a tutorial from Maxim describing the differences between switch mode, linear, and pulse Li Ion battery chargers. Advantages and disadvantages of each are covered by the article. There are three methods to charging Li+ batteries: switch-mode, linear and pulse. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. Switch-mode charging minimizes power dissipation over a wide […]
App Note: Reballing BGA devices tutorial
Here’s a video tutorial on how to reball BGA devices. First you’ll need to remove the IC, and clean up the leftover solder from the IC and the board. Next step is to place the ball grid template over the IC and add tiny solder pellets which when heated will adhere to the IC. Once […]
Cheap laptop GPS module hacked to work with microcontrollers
Emeryth discovered that these cheap laptop PCI GPS modules can easily be interfaced with microcontrollers. On the back of the board there are testpoints which he identified as UART and USB. The USB is recognized as a CDC-ACM standard virtual COM port.
Hacked footprint on a USB flash drive
A few weeks ago Mats used a hacked footprint, where he removed the unused pins to help him route a board. Here’s a commercial USB flash drive that uses the same method. Few of the pins on the memory chip were removed, and traces are run under them. Via the forum.
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 January 25, 2013
Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week. Free PCB Friday is coming up soon. Ian featured engineer on EEWeb Dangerous Prototypes kits on EEVBlog #413 mailbag Sample boxes for Bus Pirate educational kit Shipping goodies from Shenzhen Bus Pirate Arduino Shield, Android Accessory Development kit, DP6037 SMT.v1 free PCB build Workshop Update for […]
Workshop Update for January 24th, 2013
Today we worked on adding output pin level inversion to the raw wire modes of the Bus Pirate. Unfortunately the raw3wire and raw2wire modes are implemented differently, requiring lots of code changes to implement fully. So far we made a patch that should enable level inversion for the CLK and DIO pins in the raw […]
555 based constant current lead-acid battery charger
Kennith needed a 1A constant current lead-acid battery charger for his HAM radios. He augmented the 555 contest winning battery charger circuit by replacing the relay with an LM317 in constant current mode. Since the SLAs are relatively small, and I only need them charged between radio outings, I opted to build a 1A constant […]
High quality entropy source
Wardy decided to build a high quality random number generator. After searching the web he stumbled upon this project which uses a laser hitting sand in an hour-glass to generate the randomness. He upgraded the project a bit by adding a servo to reset the hour glass. He is currently recording a large number of […]
National Instruments acquires Digilent Inc
Here’s a bit of industry news, National Instrument’s acquired Digilent Inc. Digilent is a manufacturer of educational and development boards for FPGAs, microcontrollers, and PSoCs. They were also kind enough to sponsor our latest open 7400 contest with two Analog Discovery bench tools. National Instruments (NI) recently acquired all the outstanding shares of Digilent Inc. […]
Another tiny Linux box
Odrioid is yet another tiny board capable of running Linux or Android. It’s only 48mm x 52mm, yet it features a 1.7 GHz quad core Cortex A9 processor, the Mali-400 quad core GPU, and 2 GBs of DDR2. Unfortunately there are no GPIO pins, so interfacing with it has to be done through 2 USB […]
Emulating an LCD controller with a Papailio
Alex received a monochrome 256×128 LCD with a missing controller chip. The board features 8 Hitachi LCD drivers, but without the controller you have to drive the display by constantly sending data to refresh the picture. After some research he stumbled onto the Hitachi LCD controller driver LSI data book, which gave him enough info […]
How to make PCBs on thermal tape
Here’s an interesting method for designing PCBs that you’d like to mount on heatsinks. This tutorial explains how to make your PCB using thermal tape as the copper substrate. A thin piece of copper is mounted onto thermal tape, then just use whatever etching process you prefer. Via Electronics Lab.
Workshop Update for January 22nd, 2013
Today we worked on the Bus Pirate future version development. We’re trying to incorporate the Logic Shrimp v2 method of recording signals to the Bus Pirate. This new project extends Bus Pirate’s features into recording and replaying protocol signals and more.