Brendan built a breakout board for the 44pin QFN ATxmega uC. He designed the board to have a USB connection and a 500mA 3.3V power supply. 30 of the pins were broken out to two rows of 0.1” pinheaders on either side of the board. You can download the source files from GitHub. I recently […]
Category Archives: project logs
Christmas LED card morphed into a singing birthday card
Drew had a few of our X-mas LED cards left over from the holidays, so he decided to re-purpose one of them into a singing birthday card. He connected a small speaker to one of the LED pads, and reprogrammed the AVR to output an 880 Hz note. Via the comments.
Converting an infrared cooker for reflow soldering
SadE and Rubu are trying to convert an infrared cooker into an oven for reflow soldering. This is a different than a normal toaster over, and claims to heat very quickly. The idea is to add a PID controller to the oven for temperature control, and slow down the convection fan so parts don’t fly […]
AVR transistor tester build
Mick received his boards for the AVR transistor tester (machine translation) and was quick to assemble them. His board was designed to the exact dimensions of a 2X16 LCD screen. He did have some issues with the silk screen, but all in all we think his boards are awesome. Via the forum.
DIY music box with PIC32
Markus built a DIY music box from some old speakers and a PIC32 microcontroller. The uC generates the sound, and the amplifier that’s integrated into the speakers amplifies it. being inspired by another project of ChaN I decided to build my own music box. The theory is described in detail on ChaN’s page, so I […]
DIY EzPSoC3 development board built and tested
Kartik tested the DIY EzPSoc3 development board. After fighting with some annoying short-circuits, he was able to get the board up and running. The MiniProg3 programmer-debugger recognized it right away. He was able to program a bootloader and a small “blink-LED” demo. You can download the source files from his site. Via the forum.
8×8 bi-color LED matrix toy
This a 8×8 bi-color LED matrix toy is driven by an MSP430 microcontroller, a few 74HC595 serial to parallel ICs, and some MOSFETs. At the end of the video you can see the animation in action. Via the forum.
Silabs C8051F320 breakout board, intro to 8051s
Zeta designed a breakout board for the Silabs C8051F320 microcontroller. A nice feature of this uC is that it doesn’t require external crystal to support full-speed (12Mbps) USB. The C8051F320 is a nice chip it needs only 4 Capacitors to work. It comes in a hand solderable QFP32 package (0.8mm pitch). It has an internal […]
Open source soldering iron driver test videos
Arhi made some videos of his open source soldering iron driver tests. SID is capable of driving any soldering iron with RTD or ThermoCouple sensor. In this video I’m testing the HAKKO soldering iron and a HAKKO clone iron made by GORDAK. In the next test he compares the heater/sensor readings to the actual tip […]
Simple USB to UART adapter that works with 3.3V and 5V UART signals
The serial UART is a common interface used by many chips and devices. Ginpb designed a USB-to-UART adapter that works with 3.3V and 5V UART signals. The device is based around the FTDI FT232BL USB-to-UART IC with an added 3.3V power supply. The different interface levels are selected by an on-board jumper. Via the forum.
30-Meter Amateur Radio beacon using Parallax Propeller
Eldon Brown, WA0UWH, has been experimenting with a Parallax Propeller he received for Christmas. Being an avid amateur radio operator, Eldon decided to code up a low power radio beacon on the 30-Meter amateur radio band (10.10 to 10.15 MHz.) He wrote this simple program to generate very slow speed CW (Morse code) radio transmissions […]
Teensy 2.0 based transistor tester
Wingnut decided to port the AVR transistor tester to his Teensy 2.0 board. The transistor tester is a tool for identifying and measuring common discrete semiconductors and passive devices. I decided to port the component tester (freely using Google Translate to get some sense of the comments) as my first hands-on tutorial, and managed to […]
Soldering iron driver update
Arhi posted pictures of his latest soldering iron driver build: Here are the pictures of the populated board. Actually the DC driver is not populated as I’m not very interested in it and there’s no usb connector and D10, R40 as those are also only required for USB operation and I ain’t going to be […]
Alphanumeric “bubble-type” DL1414 LED I2C display driver
Paul made built an I2C driver for a 16-digit alphanumeric “bubble-type” display. He used four 4-digit DL1414 displays connected to a PCF8575 16bit I2C port expander and a 74138 logic IC. He was nice enough to provide the source files for his project. Via the forum.
Arhi’s transitor tester built into a case
Arhi built a transistor tester, a tool that recognizes and measures most common semiconductors. We’ve been following this project closely for the past week or so. After building a perf-board version, he made this version to put in a case. Check out the video of it in operation above. Via the forum.
Portable software defined transceiver: Power amplifier
Jason has been working on a portable software defined transceiver design for the past year. Every day this week he’ll discuss a different part of the hardware in a series of guest posts. You can chat with the designer in the forum. Today’s post is about the power amplifier. Since this project is designed for […]
Little Wire UART bootloader
Kehribar added a UART bootloader to his Little Wire AVR multi-tool. The Little Wire is an AVR programmer that can also be used as an SPI bridge, analog-to-digital converter, and PWM generator. This project uses the ATtiny Reset pin, which means a high voltage programmer has to be used to setup the pin configuration fuses […]
Portable software defined transceiver: Transmitter
Jason has been working on a portable software defined transceiver design for the past year. Every day this week he’ll discuss a different part of the hardware in a series of guest posts. You can chat with the designer in the forum. Today’s post is about the transmitter. The transmitter portion of a transceiver is […]
MetroChange lets you donate leftover MetroCard balance to charity
Students at NYU are developing a project to allow users of New York City’s MetroCard magnetic transit cards to donate leftover funds to charity directly from the card. It’s known as the MetroChange project and uses commonly available hardware, including an Arduino and mag stripe reader. The group really took a serious approach to development, […]
Portable software defined transceiver: Roofing filter
Jason has been working on a portable software defined transceiver design for the past year. Every day this week he’ll discuss a different part of the hardware in a series of guest posts. You can chat with the designer in the forum. Today’s post is about the roofing filter. The term roofing filter is used […]