From the comments on our earlier Mechanical Donkey Kong post: I love this kind of stuff. Here’s another one, totally mechanical, that you may not have seen before: Giant Digi-Comp II Recreates Mechanical Computer from 1960s Maker Faire NY 2011 … Read more
A current controlled buck converter for driving high-power LEDs. The PIC12F675 microcontroller has an integrated comparator, which in combination with a low pass filter provides a control circuit for the SMPS. The circuit is based on a buck topology switching … Read more
A Mouser order with parts for the atx breakout board case arrived. Also some odds and ends for the dp badges for NY. This is a test using a WordPress post instead of twitter. Let us know if it gets … Read more
Ghosts in the ROM: While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes … Read more
Here’s one you don’t see often. Matseng built a free USB POV Toy PCB. These almost never get built due to the challenging QFN chip. The POV Toy is a hand-held persistence of vision toy that can be updated over … Read more
Microchip shows how to port the open source Helix MP3 decoder algorithm to the PIC32MX family of microcontrollers. This algorithm was designed be used by both floating point processors, and fixed point processors like the PIC32. Application note describes the … Read more
Our latest 3D model is the Bus Blaster v2.0a1. We continued to play around with Maxwell’s free rendering plugin for SketchUp. We reduced the gloss on plastic components, as per Jerome’s advice, for even more realistic rendering. Thanks Jerome. The … Read more
Here is an app note from Linear Technology covering the problems and solutions of designing circuits with ultra-high speed comparators. More specifically the problems associated with using their LM1394 7ns single supply comparator. The mechanics and subtleties of achieving precision … Read more
Here’s a reference guide from Microchip about the high-speed PWM modules found on some PIC24E and dsPIC33E microcontrollers and digital signal processors. This module is a advanced version of the standard ECCP pulse-width modulator on PIC microcontrollers. It’s designed mainly … Read more
Dave reviewed the Krohn-Hite DC Voltage precision power supply he bought. After checking if it was working within specs, he proceeded to open it up and see what it was made of. There were a few surprises inside, like the … Read more
Get your tweets in now, the Thermal Tweeter live stream will end later this week. Send a tweet to @dangerousproto and watch it print out live on the USTREAM feed. The Thermal Tweeter is sitting in the photo studio, and … Read more
CubeSpawn open source manufacturing system: Eventually it will have a metal cutting milling machine, a lathe, a surface grinder, a RepRap module and many other capabilities. It is completely open source and my goal is that whoever decide to build … Read more
OHANDA, the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance is an initiative to foster sustainable sharing of open hardware and design. The idea is for designers and manufacturers of open source hardware who wish their work to conform to the “Four … Read more
Ben Ryves built his own version of the superprobe. having no need for some of the standard features he has modified the source for additional functionality. there is an excellent video of Ben demonstrating his superprobe after the break.
last week we asked, what microcontroller architecture do you use most? Many of our projects use 8 bit pic18 series micros, clearly a workhorse of our projects. But with only 16 votes total, our poll is probably not representative of … Read more
In The Forum
Recent Comments