Posted 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! ”

Posted December 31, 2011 by Chris

Happy New Year 2012

Posted December 25, 2011 by Chris

Merry Christmas 2011

Posted 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.”

Posted 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.”

Posted 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.

Posted 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.

Posted 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.

Posted 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.

Posted September 25, 2011 by Chris

The watchdog timer is something most embedded designers put off learning about until it’s necessary, primarily because it’s not typically necessary. However, when you begin designing for very redundant systems for space or autonomy, you will have to use it. This article covers what this thing is and how it is used. Some software examples are included.