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Grid Intertie
Just spent a few days designing & laying out this circuit.It's a microcontroller-based grid intertie that takes energy from a low-power source (such as a small wind turbine) and feeds it into the...
View ArticleRadiant Heat!
Laen delivered all kinds of goodies last night, including a PCB that he'd kindly included in a trial run of the DorkbotPDX PCB-manufacturing interest group. I stuffed the board last night and got it...
View ArticleUSB-CAN Dongle Alive!
Well, that's two for two! The other board Laen fabbed for me was a USB-CAN dongle based on a Luminary LM3S5732 processor. I stuffed it this morning and spent a couple hours reviving my JTAG setup this...
View ArticleRibbon Cable on TO-92
Low-grade vinyl insulation on ribbon cable is stretchy enough to be pulled back, then slide back over soldered pins.
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Cool Thing With Broken Teensy
So Paul brought some Teensies that didn't pass testing -- pins shorted, or not connected, or something doesn't work for some reason. His evil bargain: you can have one for free, but you have to do...
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Broken Teensy + Txtzyme + Perl = AVR Serial Programmer!
Paul told me it was difficult, but not impossible, to make an AVR USB bootloader that fits in 512256 words of Flash (coincidentally, the size of the smallest configurable boot block on most of the...
View ArticleDigikey Group Order 20-Sep-2010
Here's the order page...I hope I got everybody's stuff right (or at least my errors weren't for really expensive parts!) http://www.dorkbotpdx.org/node/613?size=_original
View ArticleMSP430G2211 is Low Power
Following a post on Hackaday, I dug out an old LCD display and wrote a little program to run it. In normal/active mode, according to my mediocre meter, the whole thing draws 90-100uA. When you put it...
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Breadboard DC/DC Converter
Here's my latest PCB design. It's a breadboard-mount DC/DC converter. I run many of my projects off a big 12V battery because 1) I have one; 2) it holds a lot of energy; 3) it can put out a huge amount...
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"Nixie" House Numbers
I've been meaning to do this for a couple of years now. Nixie-tube house numbers. But houses don't move (often), so you really only need one digit per tube. Plus, you need it BIG. Thanks to Portland...
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Your Old Technology Cannot Defeat Me!
My house has/had an old alarm system with keypads and sensors here & there. However, the control unit was old and decrepit and had no security system behind it, so I yanked it out and tossed it....
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JTAG Nostalgia
Long story short: the GuruPlug JTAG wouldn't even debug the GuruPlug, let alone any other board I tried it with. I knew my freshly-compiled bleeding-edge OpenOCD was at least somewhat functional,...
View ArticlePrime Numbers the Hard Way
There's an artsy dude who got his Kickstarter mentioned on boingboing. The project is a little mechanical counter with some smarts built in: every time you press a button, it computes and displays the...
View ArticleA Music From Very Short Programs Box
This weekend my friend Jacob S. and I built a Arduino based music box to play Ville-Matias Heikkilä wonderful one-line C code that makes surprisingly complex "Music From Very Short Programs." We used...
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ByteBeats Clean w/ Teensy-3.1
Here's a clean version of the ByteBeats circuit we built last Sunday. I used a Teensy-3.1 instead of a Teensy-2.0, but everything else is more-or-less the same. (I added some capacitors on the power...
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TinyPrime
I'd been meaning to do this for a while, and when I got a bag of colorful little breadboards, it was TIME.This is a rebuild of the TeensyPrime project I built a while ago, using a separate breadboard...
View ArticlePower Playground
Here's the beginnings of a circuit for playing with what I think of as power electronics -- particularly inductors and batteries. Design goal is modest voltage (6-25V), modest current (1-5A), modest...
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Standalone SPI 7-Segment Display
I had some spare 4-digit 7-segment LED displays and some AT90USB82s, and I'd always intended to do something with them. This was probably the easiest thing! It's just the AT90 driving the display,...
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Power Playground Project
Here's a few pictures of my latest project: "Power Playground." It's a PMOS/NMOS H-Bridge with FETs that can handle 3 amps or so, plus a SPI current sensor, some switches & a rotary encoder (not...
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