Category: electronics
-
Surface-mount breakout boards
Since I didn’t get the parts I wanted to play with this weekend (apparently Digikey is “upgrading [their] systems in the warehouse which has delayed some orders”), I got around to building something I’d been meaning to: some surface-mount (smd) adapter /breakout boards. So far I’ve been trying to pick components that have both through-hole…
-
Toaster oven reflow soldering: first tests
I recently splurged and bought this $30 Target toaster oven ($36 online) to try my hand at reflow soldering. I’d be holding off on this since most of the articles I saw online talked about hacking into the mains-level toaster oven circuitry to add custom temperature controllers — didn’t seem worth it. But then I found…
-
Brushless motor driver
For the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a new project: implementing a brushless motor (bldc) driver, with the distant goal of building a quadcopter from scratch. Sidenote — I’m still narrowing in on what I consider to be doing something “from scratch”. BLDC drivers (apparently called “ESCs” in the RC world) seem to…
-
Nexys 4
I’ve blogged in the past about my Nexys 3, though I haven’t used it very much lately (other than leaving it in bitcoin-mining-mode, where it’s earned me about ten cents in the past week). I was browsing the Digilent website for some an ARM-based Raspberry-Pi equivalent (I already forget why), and I checked out their new…
-
Testing PCB miniaturization
Update: I received the updated boards back and assembled one. In my Component Area Costs post, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to show that, perhaps unsurprisingly, PCB fabrication costs can easily dominate component costs for single- or small-quantity PCB orders. My reaction was to start minimizing the areas of all my PCBs; I think this…
-
Dropbox Hackweek, part 2: building a simple robot
I’m late in writing this post since Hackweek was a few weeks ago now, but better late than never I suppose. As I mentioned in my previous hackweek post my goal was to use my new 3D-printer to build some parts for a simple robot. Unfortunately, getting the 3d-printer working took four out of the five…
-
Component area costs
I just blew out two ATmega328’s, so while I wait for more to arrive I thought I’d post about something that’s been on my mind. I’ve been getting my PCB’s made by OSH Park, an often-recommended source from which I’ve gotten great results so far, but the costs are starting to add up. I’ve also…
-
Finishing the Activity Monitor
This is a followup to some of my earlier posts, where I take the design from this post, have it made by OSH Park as in this post, and finally now I talk about what I needed to do to fix it up and get it working. Getting it working Creating a custom circuit board…
-
Myduino: creating a low-cost arduino substitute
One issue I’ve quickly run into is that I want to embark on new projects, but don’t want to completely disassemble my existing projects in order to get the parts I need. For some parts of the project, like resistors and wire, it’s pretty easy to over-buy those and not need to scavenge old projects…
-
Making custom PCBs
If you look at my recent posts, the pattern that I think emerges is that I’m learning that technologies and disciplines that previously seemed inaccessible, are in fact most definitely accessible. For instance, I assumed that since FPGAs aren’t something you see very often, using them must be a magical process with a high barrier…
kmod's blog 