Category Archives: components

DEFCON 21 video: Decapping Chips the Easy Hard Way

In this presentation from DEFCON 21, Adam “Major Malfunction” Laurie and Zac Franken of Aperture Labs go hardcore with chip analysis. For some time it has been possible to discover the inner workings of microprocessors with the help of a microscope and some nasty chemicals such as fuming nitric acid. However, unless you have access […]

NEW PROTOTYPE: Premium Make Your Own Keyed Cable Kit

How often have you been caught without the right cables? You can salvage an old ugly one from somewhere, or make a last minute part order that delays your project. Never again! The Premium Make Your Own Keyed Cable Kit from Dangerous Prototypes contains enough housing and sockets to make an (almost) lifetime supply of […]

GIVEAWAY: Premium Make Your Own Cable Sample Pack

Today the Premium Make Your Own Cable Kit is available at Seeed Studio. During development we ended up with tons of connectors, so we kitted them up into a sample pack. 200 cable kit sample packs are now available in the free PCB store. If you’d like to get one now but don’t have a coupon, […]

NEW PROTOTYPE: Premium Make Your Own Cable Kit

How often have you been caught without the right cables? You can salvage an old ugly one from somewhere, or make a last minute part order that delays your project. Never again! The Premium Make Your Own Cable Kit from Dangerous Prototypes contains enough connectors to make an (almost) lifetime supply of cables for standard […]

NEW PROJECT: BGA Reballing Practice Kit, removal, reballing, soldering exercise

At Hacker Camp Shenzhen we learned to reball BGA chips at a mobile phone repair school. This technique was developed to repair cell phones with little to no equipment. That means no expensive reballing rigs, no collection of tiny replacement BGA balls. Just simple hand tools. We thought it was so cool we bought all […]

Experience with the TM240A pick and place

Chuck of LinearLogiX writes: We bought the TM240A and found it works pretty good for our needs. A couple items I found was that using the SMD type tant caps on a reel, I had to actually Grind the side to open width so the plastic holder would fit. As you can see in the pictures it would […]

Cypress PSoC4 chip sale

Cypress Semiconductor, makers of the popular PSOC4 Pioneer kit, are making their PSOC4 chips available for a limited time for $1.00 each, including free worldwide priority shipping. (Note, this price is for the chip alone, NOT the Pioneer Kit.) “PSoC4 is a scalable and reconfigurable platform architecturefor a family of mixed-signal programmable embedded system controllers […]

PSoC3/4/5 built-in waveform generator

Xykon writes: I haven’t used my PSoC board in a while so I checked what’s new and found a new ready to use waveform generator component that makes use of the built-in 8bit dac. I went straight ahead to check it out… Beside the standard sine/square/triangle/sawtooth forms you can either draw your own pattern directly […]

Another better component storage

Here’s another better way to store your electronics components by Nick of Arachnidlabs: I think I’ve found a better way to store those parts, though. I sourced some 3” x 5” antistatic bags for a pittance, lasercut a box to hold them in, and printed off some simple labels to keep track of what’s in each one. Here’s […]

PIC16F1454 used as inexpensive ARM debugger

Peter Lawrence has been working on using a PIC as a CMSIS-DAP ARM debugger. I wanted to see what was feasible in the way of a very-low-cost ARM board. OK, that doesn’t sound original, but stick with me. The solutions that I’ve seen (Tweeny, McHck, mbed, etc.) are limited to wholesale firmware updates. Press a […]

Bus Pirate cable professionally printed shrink tubes

Professionally printed shrink tubes arrived for the Bus Pirate probe cable prototype we discussed yesterday. 110 each of 10 labels cost 180RMB ($30). These are about about 5x more expensive than printing them ourselves on the L-Mark (ribbon+tube cost). The the print quality is more consistent than ours and the font nicer, but when it’s […]

Modified Arduino DS1307RTC library that also works for MCP7940N

Ray writes, “When your project needs a real-time clock (RTC), don’t you hate that the popular DS1307 costs several dollars? I recently came across Microchip’s MCP7940N, which is an inexpensive alternative to DS1307. On the hardware side it is pretty much a drop-in replacement (although Microchip recommends adding several extra elements). The software requires a […]

MSP430TCH5E MCU integrates haptic and cap touch sensors

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player TI has announced their new MSP430TCH5E microcontrollers which include haptics and capacitive touch capabilities on one chip. This allow users to add vibrational feedback on capacitive touch buttons, sliders and wheels, as well as capacitive touch screens in designs. The Immersion TouchSense technology enables 122 different haptics effects, including effect […]

Share and visualize KiCad components with KiCadCloud

Alan C. Assis writes with a new way to share and visualize KiCad components. It is not easy to find KiCad components. Normally people search at www.kicadlib.org or just “Google” for the component part-number + KiCad, but neither approach normally will return good results. At end of day he/she decides to “home-brew” their components. But […]

Mouser free TI FRAM MCU webinar

Mouser is sponsoring a free webinar on MSP430 FRAM MCUs. This event will provide a technical introduction to embedded FRAM, and provide reference designs that can help with your next project. The sponsors state that attendees will be entered for a chance to win a TI FRAM MSP-EXP430 Experimenter Board Kit. The webinar is set […]