Cheap Function Generator

posted Jan 5th 2007 11:55am by Will O'Brien
filed under: contests, misc hacks

I’m inclined to put up [nuxie1]‘s function generator how-to because he also submitted a very nice Design Challenge entry. The generator is based on the cheap XR2206 IC which will generate functions at up to 1Mhz. Definitely handy to have around.

His Design Challenge entry was really over the top. It’s another USB PIC programmer, but he laid out three different desings. A full-on SMD, a home build SMD and a through hole board. Nice work.

We’ll be announcing the winner of the Design Challenge in another week and a half or so – we got quite a few entries and it takes a while to really review them.

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Comments [5]

5 Responses to Cheap Function Generator

nuxie1 says:

January 6, 2007 at 12:34 am

I didn’t think my entry was that over the top :p
I’ll hopefully be posting a few more projects on my site in the next few weeks.

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kcbanner says:

January 6, 2007 at 2:08 am

nuxie1 I noticed you have a MSP430 section on your site…recently I found a wifi hostpost locator keychain thing…opened it up and there is a 16 pin “MSP430″ connector on the board. I imagine that its for a JTAG connector or something? If you want more info about it email me at kcbanner@gmail.com

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ian says:

January 6, 2007 at 8:40 am

All the other entries seem to be posted to a blog. I just put mine in a zip file on my host and submitted the link. Would it be helpful if I also posted it to instructables or something?

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Elliott says:

January 6, 2007 at 10:49 am

how do you make 3d renderings of the board like that?

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... says:

January 6, 2007 at 2:30 pm

to make those 3d renderings, you use a script called eagle3d. You design the board in eagle, then run the eagle3d script on it. It has a library of most parts, or you can make your own (you need to be able to use povray tho) This creates a text file that can be opened with povray, which is a really nice looking board.

One thing I was wondering, does anyone know if it is possible to export the povray file into something that could be used in Solidworks? I do a lot of files in solidworks, and it would be really neat to have real renders of the boards in my designs!

I found a program to go the ohteer way (solidoworks->povray) here
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://solidworks.cad.de/prog_stl2pov.htm&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=3&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dpovray%2Bsolidworks%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26rls%3DGGLG,GGLG:2006-28,GGLG:en

In any case, thanks for the design! I will be making a few of these… I always thought that the only choice was the icl8038 (since the max038 isn’t made anymore) but those top out at like 100khz. And the chips are reasonably priced at $5 a pop on ebay :)

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