Posted July 3, 2012 by Chris

“There are a number of cheap and adorable OLED displays appearing on ebay and elsewhere. But their parallel interfaces, enigmatic driver ics and funny voltage requirements make them tricky to use. These breakout boards make it easy to connect an oled to an Arduino or any other device with a SPI interface.”

Posted June 23, 2012 by Chris

“Parallel port is basic need for hardware engineers involved in Microcontroller, FPGA or DATA Acquisition Projects. But now the PC Assembler companies (Lenevo, Dell) are not giving an parallel port in the system. Parallel port on a laptop is very rare…laptops have only USB, HDMI, VGA and RJ45. But they forgot our need the serial port and the Parallel Port.”

Posted June 20, 2012 by Chris

“The PICADC is a simple 12-bit, 8-channel analog to digital converter (with 4 additional digital inputs), which may be connected to the PC through the serial interface (RS232). The sequence of sampled channels, and sampling frequence are programmed by the PC.”

Posted June 8, 2012 by Chris

“When you don’t have time to do a real project you make up one. While doing some microcontroller tests I was using four separate LEDs. This was a bit messy with all the current limiting resistors. What would be better would be a small set of LEDs with resistors in one handy single block.”

Posted June 7, 2012 by Chris

“Hey folks, this post is about my approach to building a pretty basic dual brushless motor controller. I’m going to focus on the power section in this post, and as soon as I have time I’ll discuss the code/FroBoard side of things in another post. I got started on the power section last night after a copious amount of coffee, and wrapped it up this morning- it’s a pretty simple build if you’re used to building stuff on perf board.”

Posted May 23, 2012 by Chris

“For my next project, I will need to know the relative position of a moving (<10cm/s) object above (+/- 10 cm ) a surface (flat, but of any quality). After playing with accelerometers, I realized it won’t work (damn you, gravity) so I took the other option I thought of: an optical mouse.”

Posted May 19, 2012 by Chris

“I was curious about PS/2 interfacing to an FPGA, a quick look about the web and I found the VHDL Keyboard Input tutorial. I used the guts of the interface handling from the example design with a few minor mods to display the last 16 scancodes on the VGA monitor, along with HEX and binary representation of those codes.”

Posted April 26, 2012 by Chris

“In this article, we’ll use the CPLD Dev Board that I assembled together years ago and add an analog to digital converter IC, along with an LED bar and some current limiting resistors for output to verify the A/D converter is working. VHDL is listed as a pre-req as we’ll be using it to design our custom A/D interface.”

Posted April 21, 2012 by Chris

“A while ago I picked up a Xilinx XC95108 CPLD in a PC84 package for about $10 from a surplus electronics shop. When I built a CPLD project board with a PC44 socket I realized that I never wanted to deal with a socket like that on a home-etched board again, so in the back of my mind I had been looking for an excuse to surface mount the big chip. When I got the urge one weekend to build a PCI card I realized that there would never be another project that offered such easy routing of surface mount pads to card edge fingers.”

Posted March 27, 2012 by Chris

“In this tutorial, I’m going to show how to interface a Dekatron tube to a Parallax Propeller microcontroller. This is similar technique to what I used in the Packetron-9000 project, although in that project I used mosfets. MPSA42 transistors are much cheaper and a lot easier to interface.”