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Fading LEDs via PWM

January 19, 2012 by Chris
A very neat feature that PWM (pulse with modulation) offers is being able to control the brightness level of LEDs. By varying the duty cycle percentage, we can control the exact brightness of any LED. This article takes you through a simple example design step-by-step using a PIC microcontroller. The end result is an LED controller that can set an LED to 100 unique brightness levels.

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2012 Freeday At Sparkfun

January 11, 2012 by Chris
“Free Day is the time when SparkFun gives back to our community and customers.This year we're giving away $200,000 to 2,000 lucky people, one hundred dollars at a time. When you fill out the captcha above (to prove you're a human), a request is sent to our servers where there is a Geiger tube hooked up. If the Geiger tube detects a particle of ionizing radiation during your request, you win! It's truly random! ”

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Happy New Year – 2012

December 31, 2011 by Chris


Happy New Year 2012





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Merry Christmas – 2011

December 25, 2011 by Chris


Merry Christmas 2011





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DIY dsPIC breadboard

December 9, 2011 by Chris
“This thing may remind you of an Arduino but it’s not, it’s not even an AVR but a dsPIC30F2012. Lots of times I want to try out something, but I’m too lazy to make the whole thing over and over on a breadboard so why not solder it together quick on a pref board so I can just stick it in.”

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Single-Digit Nixie Clock Driver

November 8, 2011 by Chris
“A while ago I found a Burroughs B-5853 Nixie tube kicking around in the lab and decided that I should put it to good use. Since I only had one of this size, I wanted to make a single-digit display out of it. After I saw Jason Harper's Nixie clock gallery, I decided that one digit really could make a cool clock.”

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Open 7400 Competition Winners

November 7, 2011 by Chris
The winners of the 7400 logic competition were announced last week. PyroElectro's Masochist's Video Card won 2nd place and TTL Tilt Sensor won 3rd place! A lot of interesting and mostly DIY style projects were entered. Take a look through the winners list and you'll likely find a project that explains the details of something you've always wanted to make.

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Digital Circuits: Traffic Light Control Circuit

November 1, 2011 by Chris
“This electronic project based only on 74LSxx family and IC 555 as clock source. It's a digital logic circuit which means to build this Traffic Light Control you don't need a microcontroller or processor.”

The article describes the project in a lot of detail, so it's a good resource for anyone looking to brush up on their raw digital design skill-set.

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Dynamic Ambient Color Lamp

October 22, 2011 by Chris
This article offers a very detailed write-up of how the author built an ambient lamp with network control capability. Software and hardware theory and design are explained thoroughly and available in the article, good for some light saturday-sunday reading.

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Learner’s CPLD Dev Board

October 18, 2011 by Chris
Here is a great project for getting your hands dirty while honing in on both your PCB board design skills and verilog/vhdl programming skills. The article shows you how to make a small, simple and straight- forward dev board for a well known Xilinx CPLD. The documentation is thorough, with example code and all the hardware design (eagle board layout and schematic) available for download.

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