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Messages - dougal

2
Bus Pirate Development / Re: Hand solder BP 3.8?
Okay, I guess I can give it a shot, when I have the time. I know I've seen loupes pretty cheap on Amazon. I did finally get some fine-pointed tips for my Weller soldering station (ST5, ST6, ST7). It might be a while before I get to it. Too many other things going on right now. :)
3
Bus Pirate Development / Hand solder BP 3.8?
So a while back, I won a free Bus Pirate 3.8 board. Last week, I finally got around to ordering all the components I needed from Mouser, and they arrived a couple of days ago.

I was planning to try to hand-solder everything, but now that I see with my own eyes just how small some of the components are, I'm wondering if I'm up to to the task. Should I go ahead and give it a try, or should I just hang onto everything until I have a chance to get an old toaster oven to convert for reflow?

If hand-soldering isn't near-impossible, any generic advice?
4
Project logs / Re: antiAFK
I hate to sound negative, but isn't the ATMEGA32U4 a bit overkill for this?

I did something similar last summer using a Digispark, which uses the ATTiny85. In my case, I used the DigiUSB library to emulate a mouse instead of a keyboard, with a small amount of movement to prevent the screensaver from activating.

http://digistump.com/board/index.php/topic,1018.0.html
5
General discussion / Re: Newbie Questions
When I took a digital circuits course in college, the professor gave us an interesting project to reinforce our logic knowledge (boolean logic, Karnaugh maps, etc):

We had to build a 5-bit adding calculator using nothing but multiplexers, demultiplexers, and NAND gates. And we had to try to do it with the minimum cost (number of components).

The funny part was, the original spec didn't include the use of NANDs. So my lab partner and I designed our circuit using nothing but mux/demux chips. We spent all week on our design, coming up with every trick we could to bring our component usage down. When it came time for everyone to turn in their designs, we were surprised that several other teams came up with designs with a lower cost than ours -- we couldn't imagine how they had done it. Until we found out that the professor had posted an update that allowed that use of NANDs that we had somehow not seen.

He was pretty impressed with how well we did with just the mux/demux design, though. :)

Anyhow, trying to build something simple, but with some strict constraints can be a good way to get your brain juices going, and it helps you become intimately familiar with the strengths and limitations of a particular type of component.

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