301 Moved Permanently

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 21, 2011 by Chris

“Our purpose here is to explore the potential of PIC12F683 micro for which we need a development board. The good thing is we are going to make our own board. The schematic and the actual board that I have built are shown below. I soldered all the components on a 12 x 8 cm general purpose prototyping board. ”

Posted October 20, 2011 by Chris

My crazy 7400 logic circuits continue with this week’s parody of a movie prop from Iron Man 2. The circuit built in this project is a beeping down counter and since I didn’t see this classic circuit entered into the 7400contest, I figured there’s time left for one last entry. Just like in Iron Man 2 there’s a little red button to start the countdown, a dual 7 segment led display and a nice ‘beep’ for each count.

Posted October 19, 2011 by Chris

“Built using a PIC16F84, about 4 hours worth of code and a few bits on a breadboard. This was the first time I’ve worked with PIC’s so it was a learning exercise. I started with the ‘Hello World’ microcontroller equivalent i.e. Blinking LED, then tried the ‘Knight Rider’ sequencing LEDs, and then hacked this together.”

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 October 17, 2011 by Chris

This 8-bit graphics card uses a resistor DAC, CPLD and some SRAM for a frame buffer. The article gives a brief overview (in german) of what the system uses, but the devil is in the details: the source code and hardware schematic/board layout are available for download. If you’ve ever wanted to make your own low-profile video card, this design will get you started.

Posted October 15, 2011 by Chris

“RGB signaling provides the cleanest form of analog video you can get from any video device. No wonder why computer monitors have used analog RGB since the introduction of VGA in 1987. But television is another story. Since the dawn of color TV, we’ve been stuck with lossy encoding methods in order to cram a full-color picture in the limited bandwidth of a monochrome transmission.”

Posted October 14, 2011 by Chris

Time for more accelerometer stuff! Since the 7400 logic competition is allowing more than one entry, I figured why not build something else? This tilt sensor was designed using only 7400 TTL discrete logic parts, so there is no software involved. It uses an accelerometer sensor’s output for X and Y axis to show you how much the board is tilted on an 8×8 LED matrix display.

Posted October 13, 2011 by Chris

“Back in July I was contacted by Nikki of fizzPop Hackspace in Birmingham about making very low cost Arduino clones on stripboard. I hadn’t really given it much thought until I realised how easy it would be to make an Arduino compatible device on stripboard for something less than a fiver!”

Posted October 12, 2011 by Chris

“The basic system uses a special FIFO chip (7204) which is dual-ported to store logic-state samples which are transferred into a PC and displayed using a Win-32 front-end.” If you’ve ever been curious about building your own logic analyzer, here’s a well documented open-source analyzer that will help get you started.