Posted November 17, 2014 by Chris

"We stripped out the insides of the device and mounted in our stackable led controller boards. These two boards are designed to convert random amount of LEDs to Arduino controlled matrix. There is high side controller – 8 P-channel mosfets per board. And low side controller uses TI TLC5940 16 channel led controller."

Posted November 10, 2014 by Chris

"Computer controlled Etch-a-Sketches are not rare things. In fact, there is at least one other such device made with the Raspberry Pi. However, I think my Etch-a-Pi design is pretty reasonable, so I’m describing how to build it here."

Posted November 9, 2014 by Chris

"F18A stands for ‘FPGA TMS9918A’ (hence the project’s title) and will be 100% hardware and pin compatible replacement for a TMS9918A VDP (video display processor)."

Posted November 5, 2014 by Chris

"The basic idea is when making a purchase with a credit or ATM card, the transaction information is automatically packaged and sent to a webserver where it can be logged in a database. A web interface would then allow consumers to log into their accounts and view their transactions online all in one place."

Posted November 3, 2014 by Chris

"So I’ve done persistence of vision displays before; there’s really nothing new there. The challenge this time was to make it small enough to fit on a 72mm longboard wheel, and to make it cheap enough so that I could mass produce it and sell it to folks in the area."

Posted October 31, 2014 by Chris

"This year at the Seattle and Portland Mini Maker Faires I did a presentation on getting started with designing your own PCB using KiCAD. In this presentation as an example I created a pumpkin shaped PCB with a candle like flickering LED."

Posted October 30, 2014 by Chris

"It all started when I found a ‘Power wheels’ style toy at a thrift shop for $20. As you can see I’m a little excited about it. It wasn’t working when I bought it as there were wiring issues and a bad battery. This wasn’t too much of a concern to me because I planned to overhaul it anyways. It also started out as an Audi; being a BMW guy I figured I would change that too."

Posted October 26, 2014 by Chris

"What do you get when you combine a pumpkin with the classic video game Tetris? Pumpktris! Fully playable, embedded in a pumpkin, and with the stem serving as a controller. Watch the video below to see it in action, then read on for the development story."

Posted October 22, 2014 by Chris

"The aim of the project was roughly to display stuff on a monitor by programming an AVR microcontroller as well as an FPGA . We further had a working networking interface (using an old 10 MBit Ethernet card) to retrieve the stuff we should display."

Posted August 31, 2014 by Chris

"Not wanting to screw up an expensive complex board by being a first-timer at putting an FPGA into a circuit, I figured I’d build a little test board with the cheapest Spartan 6 you can get (about $10), which comes in a solderable TQFP144 package. Sadly, most high end FPGA’s are BGA and therefore quite hard to solder as a DIY project."