Jan Mrázek documented his experience experimenting with DIY through-hole plating of PCBs: I’ve been thinking about though hole plating for several years. The general procedure is simple – you have to activate non-copper surfaces (make them conductive) and then you apply standard electroplating procedure. You can find many tutorials on the internet, however, most of […]
Author Archives: DP
ESP8266 Deep Sleep with Arduino IDE
Rui Santos has written a great guide shows us what’s Deep Sleep and how to use it with the ESP8266 in the Arduino IDE. With most of the ESP8266 modules, you can’t change the hardware to save power, but you can write software to do it. If you use the sleep functions with the ESP8266, […]
App note: Buried capacitive sensors for tamper protection
A short app note from Silicon Labs on burying pads to prevent snopping on keypads. Link here (PDF) An individual’s financial matters are increasingly electronic in nature and decreasingly interpersonal. As financial institutions replace human interaction with electronic interfaces such as ATMs, the need to make electronic circuits tamper-proof becomes critical. A typical numeric keypad […]
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: Driving E ink segmented displays
Application note on driving E Ink displays from Renesas. Link here (PDF) E Ink segmented displays are direct drive displays consisting of E Ink Vizplex Imaging Film sandwiched between two electrode layers, the top plane and the backplane, and then encased in an environmental barrier solution to protect the film and the segment electrodes. To […]
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. The coupon code usually go to Facebook ‘Other’ Messages Folder . More PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday and the blog every Sunday. Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three […]
SQUIX ESP8266 based e-paper WiFi weather station
Erich Styger documented his experience building Daniel Eichhorn’s e-paper weather station with a custom enclosure: Using e-paper for a weather station is an ideal solution, as the data does not need to be updated often. By default, the station reaches out every 20 minutes for new data over WiFi and then updates the display. Daniel […]
PIC18 four-channel DMX relay controller
Glen Akins has a nice build log on his four channel DMX-controlled relay, that is available on GitHub: Halloween was right around the corner and I needed a timer with a bunch of relays to trigger some store-bought props and a fog machine periodically. (Mental note: read fog machine specs carefully—not all come with timer remotes.) My […]
Building a Midi hat and jukebox using the Raspberry Pi
Dr. Scott M. Baker has published a new build: I picked up a Roland SC-55 to use with my retrocomputer setup recently, and I figured it would be cool to turn the thing into a standalone midi jukebox, so that no “computer” is required. I also figured this would be relatively easy, using a raspberry […]
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: Grid-connected solar microinverter reference design
A good read from Microchip on the theory behind inverter design connected to grip power. Link here (PDF) There are two main requirements for solar inverter systems: harvest available energy from the PV panel and inject a sinusoidal current into the grid in phase with the grid voltage. In order to harvest the energy out […]
App note: On-grid solar microinverter on Freescale MC56F82xx/MC56F82xxx DSCs
Application note from Freescale Semiconductor about microinverter solution develop together with Future Electronics. Link here (PDF) In recent years, demand for renewable energy has increased significantly. The development of devices utilizing clean energy such as solar, wind, geothermal, and fuel cells attracts more and more attention. Solar energy harvesting is developing fast and will play […]
Feather M0 express supersizing
Dastels writes, “In my last post I described how I hacked a 2Mbyte SPI flash onto a Trinket M0 to give it the memory space for CircutiPython of one of the M0 Express boards. This time I supersized an M0 Express board, specifically a Feather M0 Express, although the same hack should work on a Circuit […]
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. The coupon code usually go to Facebook ‘Other’ Messages Folder . More PCBs via Twitter on Tuesday and the blog every Sunday. Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three […]
Recovering Proxmark3 with the Bus Pirate
@joan_bono tweeted, “Breathing again! My Proxmark3 works like a charm after re-flashing the firmware using Bus Pirate” Get your own handy Bus Pirate for $30, including world-wide shipping. Also available from our friendly distributors.
A digital communication project using OFDM and 32-QAM
Tahmid blogged about a digital communication project using OFDM and 32-QAM as their ECE4670 final project: This builds on a previous lab, where orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used with on/off keying to send data over the channel. This scheme achieved a data rate of about 14,000 bits per second with zero errors, resulting […]
Pulse Oximeter functionality for a medical device
Alexander Lang writes: The gentlemen for whom I’m developing this hardware for has requested some additional functionality. The additional functionality requested is a Pulse Oximetry measurement. Pulse Oximetry is the measurement of a person’s pulse along with how much oxygen is present within their blood. It is a common measurement made by medical practitioners to […]
Teardown, repair and analysis of an Agilent E4443A 3Hz – 6.7GHz PSA series Spectrum Analyzer
Teardown, repair and analysis of an Agilent E4443A 3Hz – 6.7GHz PSA series Spectrum Analyzer from The Signal Path: In this episode Shahriar repairs an Agilent PSA Series Spectrum Analyzer. The instrument generates many errors during self-alignment and produces no measurements below 3.2GHz. The block diagram of the unit is thoroughly presented and various possible […]
ZX81 internal 16K RAM (reversible version)
Dave Curran wrote a post on his blog showing how he upgrades the ZX81 internal 16K RAM with a reversible version: One of the common issues with the ZX81 is the good old RAM pack wobble. Depending on the state of your edge connectors on your ZX81 and RAM pack, it sometimes does not take […]
PSOC – design and implementation of a 12 lead portable ECG
Alex Lao and his team at McMaster University have developed a compact, battery powered, 12-lead electro-cardiogram: During the academic year of 2016-2017 at McMaster University, in conjunction with Dr. DeBruin, Christina Riczu, Thomas Phan and Emilie Corcoran, we developed a compact, battery powered, 12-lead electro-cardiogram. The project won 1st place in the biomedical category at […]