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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…
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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…
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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…
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Dropbox Hackweek: 3D Printing
One of the many perks of working at Dropbox is getting to participate in Hackweek, a weeklong hackathon for everyone in the company. In the past I’ve worked on an AI project to predict user file accesses (fun but unsuccessful), a Python type analyzer and then a Python compiler built on top of the type…
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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…
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Improved blog speed by serving smaller images
Unbeknownst to me, I’ve been serving everyone full-sized images from my blog. I didn’t really notice this because I visit my blog often enough that my browser caches them and they seem to load instantly, but once I moved to a new computer I noticed how slow everything was. The issue was that my server…
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New parts!
I just got my orders SparkFun and DigiKey, and now I have a bunch of new toys to play with: Some inverter ICs A small vise to hold boards while soldering A digital oscilloscope kit And a bunch more. To add to the fun, a friend lent me their $600 Metcal soldering station since they weren’t using it;…
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Link: Spartan-6 FPGA PCB Design and Pin Planning Guide
I ran into this very-informative Xilinx user guide about PCB layout; it’s specifically tailored towards people who are interested in mounting a Spartan-6 FPGA on a board, especially for high-speed use, but I found it to be a good introduction to PCB design for high-speed circuits (such as explaining parasitic inductances, how to determine them…
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Two new hosting providers: DigitalOcean, and BitVPS
For some reason my shared hosting provider comparison post keeps on getting more traffic than the rest of my blog combined, which makes me feel compelled to post more about that space, even though I’m not particularly knowledgeable or necessarily interested in it. But anyway, I’ve recently run into two more providers that seem pretty promising,…
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Microcontroller Project: Analog Edge-Detector
One of the issues I had with my last project is I had bent one of the microcontroller pins when inserting it into the breadboard, and as a result that trace was simply not being driven despite the code being correct. One debugging tool that I think would be useful to have is what I’m calling…
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