Category: electronics
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Working on an ARM board
Pretty much all the electronics projects I’ve done so far have used AVR ATmega chips as the central microcontrollers. I’ve been meaning for a while to step-up into the world of ARM chips: it looks like you can get chips that are much more capable at just around the same price as an ATmega328P, but…
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Battery-backup with in-circuit recharging
I have a pretty simple-sounding circuit I want to build, but am surprisingly having quite a bit of difficulty finding any guidance about it on the internet (maybe I haven’t found the right google term?). It’s this: I want to provide a battery backup to a system, so that it can seamlessly switch between being…
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Some design mistake stories
I spent all yesterday dealing with some mistakes I had made in some boards; I thought I’d blog about it because 1) I spent time on it and want to feel like something came out of it :P, and 2) because I think it might be interesting to someone. Personally I find it very interesting…
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Buying an oscilloscope
I guess this post is going to be the second in an unintentional two-part series on “things that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about yet aren’t the core of the electronics issues.” The first was about how I’ve improved my organizational setup, and this one is about the process of buying an entry-level…
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New parts organization scheme
I don’t have a particularly large or complex electronics setup, but that hasn’t stopped me from searching for the “perfect” way to organize everything. I think I tend to obsess over my plan because 1) it’s easy to feel like it’s critically important, and 2) it’s something that can be difficult to change. In software…
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Quadcopter update: bldc boards ready
A couple weeks ago I wrote about how I was building a brushless motor (BLDC) driver board, for the ultimate goal of using them in a quadcopter design. Well, the boards came in about a week ago and I’m finally ready to show off what they look like — and maybe complain about how much…
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Choosing FPGA parts
I spent some time this weekend looking into different FPGA options for potential future projects; I’ve been using the Spartan-6 on my Nexys3 board, and I created a simple breakout board http://oshpark.com/shared_projects/duLs3P1R for it, but I started to learn more about the limitations of staying within that single product class. The Spartan-6 is limited on the high-end,…
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CPLDs: prototype, and breakout
I’ve recently been intrigued by the idea of using CPLDs in my designs — there have been lots (maybe 2 or 3!) of times that I’ve wanted a specific set of glue logic, only to find out it doesn’t exist or the output polarity is wrong, and I have to resort to using multiple 74xx chips.…
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PCB miniaturization: the limit
I’ve done a series of circuit board layouts of my simple “Activity Monitor” circuit, at first to teach myself PCB design and try out getting them made, and lately to test different different pcb limits, primarily miniaturization. In my last post about it, I talked about putting together a board I thought was high-density, and…
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Rescuing a mis-programmed ATmega328
I had messed up one of my circuit boards, and in the debugging process I wanted to eliminate the external crystal as a problem (since there are so few other components in a bare AVR circuit). I looked at the ATmega328 manual, and found that it features an “Internal 128kHz RC Oscillator”, which sounded safe…
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