Ever want to design your own soldering station? Sqkybeaver is workshopping a soldering station driver board in the forum now.
Author Archives: Ian
App note: High-quality white noise generator
A white noise circuit could be interesting part of a modular synthesizer. This design has no 1/f component, meaning no annoying repeating sounds in the white noise. In this noise-generator circuit, the amplifier (MAX4238) has no 1/f component in its input voltage noise. It amplifies its own input-voltage noise with a feedback network made with […]
BlackJack solderwerks hot air system
Chuckt tiped us to the BlackJack SolderWerks Hot Air System in a followup to our Aoyue 852 hot air station tool post: This is a cheaper smd hotair / re-work station in the United States. Several people on the forums say it works. Don’t buy too many of them because I want to get it […]
TOOL: Aoyue 852 hot air station
Our favorite tools have a new home on the wiki. Each week we’ll muse a bit about one of them. Have your own tool review? We’ll post that too! The Aoyue 852 is a dedicated hot air rework station. Hot air is probably the easiest way to remove soldered parts from a PCB, especially large […]
Emergency excuse generator for the office
Need a great excuse for a skipped meeting or late report? The developer of the Mars Clock has an advanced excuse generator that will get you out of a jam. A PIC 16F690 uses a library of business speak to produce random business-sounding excuses: “I had to bring the ROI estimates in sync with our […]
App note: Hot-surface warning light with no external power
This design harvests heat energy to make electricity, and uses it to flash a warning light. Flashing LED hot-surface detector: Using a thermoelectric generator (TEG) to sense the temperature of a surface and a step-up switching regulator to boost the TEG output to a useful level, this warning circuit flashes a high-brightness LED when the […]
Xilinx: Zynq-7000 extensible processing platform
Drone writes: Xilinx releases the Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform. Essentially, Zynq is a dual-core ARM A9 Cortex micro-controller surrounded by 28nm FPGA goodness on-die. There are generous amounts of hardware GPIO, serial ports, and both sync and async memory controllers. DMA is supported. Thanks Drone! Via the contact form.
The 555 SliderSynth
Makerdino shared his 555 Slider Synth in the project log forum: When it’s turned on by pressing SW1, the 555 astable oscillator is activated. It will produce a tone through the speaker that can be varied in pitch by changing the distance between the LED and the photo cell. Via the forum.
FTDI FT232H single channel USB 2.0 chip
MichaelZ writes: Well FTDI is at it again. FT232H is a Single Channel Hi-Speed USB to Multipurpose UART/FIFO IC. It appears to be 1/2 of a FT2232H which requires the crystal and EEPROM. It’s a single MPSSE (JTAG, serial module) version of the FT2232H used in the Bus Blaster, and it comes in a friendly […]
Bus Pirate v3 protoboard back in stock
The Bus Pirate v3/SOIC protoboard is back in stock at Seeed Studio. Get one for $10.
Logic Sniffer: Updated VHDL code and continous sampling mode
While we all followed dogsbody’s work on the new Verilog Demon Core for the Logic Sniffer, kinsa cleaned up the old VHDL core: New SPI code, works with the latest PIC firmware (v3.0) Working Metadata command New RLE code; n bit counters for n bit data width (except for 24 bits). Additional compression for cases […]
Serial port only Bus Pirate v3b
Here’s an update on the serial port only Bus Pirate. It’s been constructed and tested: Here it is, all populated. It’s quite crowded, but with some careful planning for doing things in the right order, it was not difficult at all. Thank goodness for solder wick. I found SparkFun’s SMD soldering tutorials very helpful. It […]
Free PCB Sunday: Bus Blaster v1
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 we’re giving away two […]
Week in (p)review: February 27, 2011
Don’t forget to share your current project in the comments or the forum. This week our favorite project gets a free SOIC protoboard. Here’s a summary of major developments over the last week: A new Bus Blaster v1 JTAG debugger was released Check out Dogsbody’s Demon Core v3.07 for the Logic Sniffer. We also released […]
9046xN random access write-only memory
MichaelZ tipped us to the 9046 x N Random Access, Write Only Memory: About 1974, Signetics bought a two-page, full-color spread in the April issue of ELECTRONICS Magazine, and published the WOM data sheet, as a (rather expensive) April Fool’s Joke. This version of the WOM data sheet shows the various features of Signetics’ Model […]
OLED display plasma routine
A plasma routine on an OLED display inspired by the CC65 plasma demo. Thanks Markus! Via the comments.
USB Infrared Toy firmware v11
USB Infrared Toy firmware v11 is now available for download. Thanks to everyone who reported bugs and helped troubleshoot Major updates: Fixed IR Sample mode transmit frequency adjustment Fixed version detect problem with IR Toy v2 Minor bug fixes and cleanup Includes Windows update utility and .inf driver file. Get the USB IR Toy for […]
PROTOTYPE: Bus Blaster v1 JTAG debugger
The Bus Blaster is a high-speed JTAG debugger/programmer that works with many ARM processors, CPLDs, FPGAs, and flash chips. It’s compatible with the most popular open source JTAG utilities such as OpenOCD and urJTAG. After almost a year of on-and-off development the first Bus Blaster v1 prototype is available. This initial batch is offered to […]
Testing the Seeeduino Stalker in extreme conditions
Seeed Studio is torture testing the Seeeduino Stalker, all-weather data-logging device: To survive in the weather like “2012″ or “the day after tomorrow”, this is not enough. We want to find the limitation of Seeeduino Stalker. Interesting project. What’s the most extreme conditions your projects have faced?
RULAV treehouse with microcontrollers, PCBs, and more
The RULAV isn’t just an ordinary treehouse: Rarely does building a treehouse require welding, grinding, painting, riveting, bending, crimping, plumbing, brazing, laser cutting, sound design, printed circuit board fabrication, thousands of lines of C code, distributed network protocols, sewing and embroidery. Thanks Jeremy! Via the contact form.