Frequency Standard Project: I took an old milli-volt meter which is long dead and gutted the case. It was a lucky day when I could just flip the face plate over and I had a ready-made front plate for my frequency standard. I got my power supply in yesterday from Digi-Key. It was $19 1470-2284-ND…
I’ve been a little busy on the workbench lately. I’ve been working late at the-day-job so I’ve been neglecting my workbench notebook and my blog for most of this week. I’ve got a ton of “fun” stuff planned for this weekend; no way I’ll get it all done. I won’t make you read through the whole…
Jayson Tautic had mentioned, on IRC the other day, a Fourth system with the ability to run on a PIC… that pretty cool (mad scientist stuff!). It prompted me to consider connectivity; I posted my progress on the recent Digi One SP project that came out of that on my last post. It’s been noticed…
I had a need for this little break-out-board for a bunch of RGB LEDs I had acquired. Have a need? A special deal to get rid of the boards and LEDs with “unknown” specs. These LEDs look just like the 60mA LEDs from China but I don’t have any specs on these. I based my…
Today was a FR4-AIL day, again. Still no PCBs in the mail today; I suspect this will be a PITA because they never left the Oregon post office. With that I wasn’t really in the mood for any “real” electronics today. Jayson Tautic mentioned he put Fourth on a PIC 18F14K22 which is pretty cool.…
To be honest, I have never considered using the PIC 16F1509 digital to analog converter before. I was considering integrating a DAC internally or externally to a microcontroller for my brother’s synth project. I started on the microchip site and found a number of smaller PICs, 12F1501.. 16F1503, that had a 5bit DAC. The 16F753 has…
Today I received the first of a couple batches of PCBs from OSH Park. This set is a simple MOSFET w/ driver. The MOSFET can be logic level driven and all my testing was done at 5VDC however the driver had a wide voltage range so running this at 9V or 12V should present no…
Took a while to clear off the bench tonight. I got a little happy with the ORDER button last week through weekend. I’ve filled two more parts storage containers and luckily one of my new packages with another parts storage container from Amazon; I couldn’t find any locally, I hope they’re still making them. The…
My wife is kicking all non-food items out of the Frig… time to find a new place for the Chip Quik! Chip Quik is a brand of solder paste used often in hobbyist reflow; this is the product I used to solder SMD parts to printed circuit boards. The product can work six months (or…