Author Archives: SQKYbeaver

New 7400 Competition sponsor: Tincantools

We are thrilled to announce that Tincantools has sponsored the Open 7400 Competition. they have graciously added the folowing to our pool of prizes. BeagleBoard plus a Trainer Flyswatter JTAG debugger DSO Nano V2 Digital Soldering Station Get your entry in and these and other cool hardware can be yours.

Announcing the Open 7400 Logic Competition

We are excited to announce the Open 7400 Logic Competition. The competition brings awareness to open hardware and software, and fosters understanding of the basic building blocks of modern integrated circuits. And most importantly, we want to have fun! What can you create using individual logic chips? Prizes include cash, hardware, development boards, and more. […]

Tektronix breaks new ground

Tektronix has released thier new MDO4000, mixed domain oscilloscope, combining the standard digital storage oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and RF spectrum analyzer. this appears to do more than just save space on the workbench. We do not have access to one for testing, but lets look at some the specs. The MDO4000 series has 2-4 analog channels capable of 500MHz or 1GHz bandwidth, […]

TS1001 low power, low voltage op-amp review

We have been experimenting with the Touchstone semi TS1001 ultra-low power, low voltage op-amp demo board, and the results are in. For our tests, the board inverting op-amp circuit was powered by a solar cell from a calculator with two 0.5v zener in series. The total supply was about 950mV, well below the operating range […]

Radio Shack listened: kits now in stock

Radio Shack is now selling educational electronics kits. Walk in in to your nearest store and you will find  about 20 kits ranging small (transistor)blinky to a USB Experiment Interface Board with a Microchip pic18. the kits are manufactured by Velleman, and come with all through-hole components, so a beginner can solder together a kit […]

Amateur radio study guide has much information about electronics

Ham radio is nothing new, however if your new to electronics, or interested  in becoming a ham, we suggest reading one of Dan’s self-study guides. The RMS value of an AC signal is the voltage that causes the same power dissipation as a DC voltage of the same value. (G5B07) For an AC signal with […]

First 32bit Arduino avalable soon

Digilent is soon to be launching two Arduino compatible platforms, the Uno32(pictured above)and the Max32. based on microchip‘s pic32mx micro controllers. Following the Arduino philosophy of easy to use software and hardware, and not to mention the support structure already in place. they are both compatibly with existing shields.

Biofuel reactor control board

Armandas has posted his masters project The design is based around a PIC18F66K22 microcontroller. The board has a switching power supply supporting an input voltages of up to 34V, five thermocouple channels, HD44780 LCD interface, a battery backed RTC and a microSD card slot. The control unit interfaces with an electrical system (designed by my […]

TOOLS: Atten ADS1062CA oscilloscope

Our favorite tools have a new home on the wiki. Each week we’ll muse about one of them. Have your own tool review? We’ll post that too! The Atten ADS1062CA is a dual channel digital storage oscilloscope capable of 1Gsamples a second, and an analog bandwidth of 60Mhz. An oscilloscope is a useful piece of […]

Update: Seeed Studio to help Japan

An update from an earlier post, Seeed Studio has come up with a design for their radiation detector. Well, as always our product will be open-sourced and hackable with flexible working conditions and at a comparatively lower price. Importantly, they will be plenty of stock. And we are also thinking a distribution pattern calls “sell […]

MIT uses kinect on quadcopter

MIT has developed a system using the Microsoft Kinect as part of an autonomous flight controller, allowing navigation and mapping when a gps signal is not available. At MIT, we have developed a real-time visual odometry system that can use a Kinect to provide fast and accurate estimates of a vehicle’s 3D trajectory. This system […]