Want a simple light show in your room? Here’s an Instructable on how to build your own. The Color organ is all analog and built from only transistors, resistors, capacitors, and of course LEDs: Audio source can be any “line level” output from audio equipment, or headphone output from computer sound cards and iPod/MP3 players. […]
Category Archives: project logs
Digitally controlled power supply
Wvdv2002 shared his digitally controlled power supply with us in the forums. It’s capable of driving 0-18V while having a current controlled output of 0-3A. The brains of the design is the PIC18f46j50 which controls a switch mode regulator’s voltage and current output through the MCP4822 two channel I2C DAC. Via the forum.
Type4me USB keyboard emulator automates passwords
Bored of always typing in the same password over and over again? Luca designed a board to tackle just that problem. It’s a USB composite device, featuring both a USB keyboard emulator and a serial port. You program the letter sequence for the keyboard to type via the serial port, then press a button on […]
Geiger counter with SI-3BG Russian tube
Erdabyz designed a Geiger counter around a SI-3BG Geiger Muller tube. It uses a PIC16F1508 to read the radiation level, and passes it to a computer via a FT232R USB-to-Serial IC. Timer 1 uses a secondary xtal oscillator at 32,768kHz as clock source. Every 2 seconds the timer overflows. Output pulse from the geiger tube […]
PCB a Week 5: Oledy generic OLED breakout board
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 5 he came up with Oledy, a breakout board featuring 8 most common pitches for OLED display connectors, spanning from 0.5mm to 1mm. The Oledy board is a 5×5 cm board meant to be cut in half ending up with two boards 2.5 […]
Control panel toy with Stellaris LaunchPad
Tom designed this mock up of a control panel for his kid’s 3rd birthday. It has 26 LEDs, a joystick, 3 buttons, and 2 switches. A Stellaris LaunchPad is used to control the LEDs depending on what user interface options are pressed, moved, or switched. Via the forum. Happy birthday Oscar.
PCB a Week 4: RetroTime
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 4 he came up with RetroTime, a digital clock with RGB LEDs in 12 tentacles extruding from the body of the PCB. Next week I’ll do a slightly more advanced project than a simple breakout. I had this idea of making a very […]
A simple, flexible adjustable dummy load
Nickjohnson posted his flexible dummy load project in the project log forum: I’ve been testing Loki’s power supply lately, and hurting for the lack of a good dummy load. There are plenty of flexible dummy load projects out there, but they’re largely over-engineered and on the expensive side. I decided to put together a really simple […]
PCB a Week 3: Double sided breakout boards
Mats continues his challenge of designing one PCB every week. In week 3 he came up with a double sided breakout board containing footprints for 24 ICs on a 5cmx5cm board. Via the forum.
4 Channel electronic load
Need to test your power supply with a 20A capable electronic load? Gelbanana is designing just such a device. It’s an electronic load designed to spread the heat dissipation through 4 transistors each taking 5 Amps. So far he is testing the cooling system which consists of two massive aluminum heat sinks. Via the forum.
Multi-processor test board for open source USB stack development
An open source USB stack for PIC microcontrollers has evolved in the forum over the last year. It supports a number of USB-enabled PICs, and a good developer would test each chip before each release. We’ve been crowd sourcing that testing in the forum, but now prolific forum member Mats is designing a PCB so […]
PCB a Week 2: DigiPot
Matseng continues his challenge of designing one PCB a week. The latest PCB is DigiPot, a digital potentiometer with a rotatory encoder for control, and a 4 digit 7-segment used to display the current value. The basic idea is a digital potentiometer with a 7-segment display that shows the current value. The “potentiometer” is a […]
Sensorless Brushless DC Motor Drive with MSP430
A booster board for the MSP430 LaunchPad controls brushless DC motors with or without sensors. A bunch of double NPN transistor MBT2222AD ICs drive the motors: I thought that I would share my project on the forum. I call it BLDC Booster. It is a booster pack for the MSP430 LaunchPad that allows for sensored […]
Lithium Polymer internal resistance meter determines battery life
Here’s a project that let’s you measure the internal resistance of Lithium Polymer batteries. It measures the total current as the battery discharges through a 1 Ohm resistor. From the known voltage and the discharge current the internal resistance can calculated. This device can be used to measure the internal resistance of Lithium Polymer batteries […]
PCB a Week 1: Crystal oscillator breakout
Matseng started a challenge for himself where he intends to post a PCB project a week. The first project is “NanoUtils Xtal” – a crystal oscillator breakout board. The board is designed to be interfaced with microcontrollers that have their oscillator pins next to a ground pin. This board is a breakout containing a SMD […]
Programmable timer switch
Need a switch that turns on and off at set times? Here is a project by Victor that does exactly that. It’s PIC18F4550 based and uses a DS1307 real time clock chip to keep time. A small 12 volt relay acts as the switch. This project, like others before, has started out of need: our […]
Yet another stepper driver
YetAnotherStepperDriver is a breakout board for the DRV8825 stepper motor controller IC. The IC can put out 3A of current, so proper cooling is a must. This is the reason behind so many vias around the bottom pad of the IC. These modules are designed to connect to a booster pack i have yet to […]
DIY surround sound dock for Apple iPods and iPhones
Here is an open source surround sound dock for Apples i-devices. It features the standard Apple connector, has two 1W speakers, and an external output for headphones. It’s uses the LA2610 analog surround sound processor and an ATTiny13 microcontroller.
DIY manual pick ‘n’ place machine
Bored with having to pick up every component with tweezers, and having them always fall off at unfortunate moments. Build a manual pick ‘n’ place machine. Basically it’s a suction cup on X and Y movable axis, with a USB camera attached for higher precision. If you are dealing with tiny SMD parts (e.g. 0402 […]
PIC32 8 channel version of the Logic Shrimp
Marcus is designing an 8 channel version of our Logic Shrimp. It features a PIC32 microcontroller driving overclocked SRAM chips for more then 20 MSamples/s. It’s designed to fit a 3cmx3cm PCB rendered above. Get a Logic Shrimp from Seeed for $35. Via the forum.