kmod's blog

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…