Get Your Kicks With This New PIC Development Board

July 18, 2015 by Kevin Dady 27 Comments

While development boards for micro controllers are nothing ground breaking, they can be expensive, and often times overkill for what you’re doing when they try to put everything you might use … including the kitchen sink. when [Brian] noticed his projects were starting to use Microchip PIC24 more and more, the time came to have a dev board on hand.

The result is a small board with breakouts for USB, UART (via FTDI), of course tons of GPIO pins, and a socket which mates with a daughter board to swap out either a PIC24FJ128GC006, or a DSPIC33EP256MU806, with the potential for more. Also packed on the board is a power regulator system and dual crystals allowing full speed operation or power sipping modes.

Schematics and PCB layout are available (in Diptrace format) along with a board template file to use with MPLAB on github.com. Once you have everything together you will need a PIC programmer, [Brian] is using a trusty Microchip MPLAB ICD 3 programmer, but naturally, others are available.

Microchip recently announced a new development board of their own for the PIC16F series. The Curiosity board has built-in support for programming and debugging (no chipKIT needed). The engineer who designed that board, [John Mouton] is going to join us on July 30th for a live chat about the design process. We’re also going to be giving away some of the first boards to come off the production line… more about that this coming week.

29 Year Old Apple Computer Finally Gets An OS Update

July 16, 2015 by Kevin Dady 36 Comments

The Apple IIGS is the 16 bit upgrade to the popular 8 bit Apple II computer line, and with its massive boost in graphics, an Ensoniq sound system, and backwards compatibility with the 8 bit machines makes this box desirable to many retro enthusiast. The last OS update, 6.0.1, was released over 22 years ago. While it worked well for the early 90s, it was by no means perfect.

Last Sunday, a post popped up on callapple.org, announcing Apple IIgs System 6.0.2. Updates include a driver for the unreleased Apple II Ethernet card, fixes various bugs in the file system translation system, various bugfixes to existing system programs, fast drawing and animation tools, and of course an update to the finder to show the new revision number.

With a hope for even more bug fixes in a possible 6.0.3 revision its good to see people still giving the old Apple II line some love, as the old Apples don’t have as large of a following as their Atari and Commodore brethren.

Move Over Gucci; Laser Cut Handbags Are A Thing

July 13, 2015 by Kevin Dady 18 Comments

What happens when you want to make a custom handbag with some handy tech features, and have access to a nice laser cutter? You end up doing what [Christian] did: design a assemble a Woman’s Handbag made of Laser-Cut Leather with iPhone charger and LED Light.

The design of the bag was made in Adobe Illustrator and sent off to a Epilog Legend 36EXT laser cutter located in the hackerspace located near [Christian] in Vienna. Once the parts were precision cut, traditional leather sewing methods were used to assemble the handbag (with a little help from a shoe cobbler).

The interior of the bag was lined with old blue jeans and a white LED, which is wired and held into place with conductive thread. Powered by a coin cell and controlled by your choice of a button, or a slide switch, the light helps locating items in the deep bag.

Slide a standard USB battery pack in one of the pockets of the old jeans and you are ready for a night out on the town. Join us after the break for a video showing the design, construction and features of this practical project.

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Automatic Water For Your Pets

February 22, 2012 by Kevin Dady 35 Comments

If you have livestock or outdoor pets you know how important it is to keep them watered, but also know that sometimes you are not around when the trough runs dry. [Buddy] solves this inconvenience with a trip to the hardware store and some creativity.

The automatic water filler is made from some PVC pipe, brass fittings, a faucet supply and a toilet float valve. The PVC is arranged into a hook shape, a fitting is put on one end for a standard garden hose. On the other end a bit of adapting is needed to convert the PVC into a faucet supply, where the toilet valve is hooked up. Now whenever your thirsty beasts get the water too low, the float lowers and tops off the watering hole with fresh H20. That sure beats running out there every day to make sure, especially with summer just around the bend.

Who Couldn’t Use A Little More Screen Space?

February 21, 2012 by Kevin Dady 23 Comments

Text LCD’s are handy for any occasion, a printer port on your PC is also darn handy as well. Mix together and add in a splash of linux and you get a very handy Linux device driver for a 16×2 LCD connected to the parallel port.

Electrically the LCD is wired up in a typical 4 bit mode, this allows the parallel port to use its 8 bit data register to write data, but also control the Register Select and Enable pins. Next is to make a module for linux to use, it seems like pretty standard fair for this type of screen.

Make the driver, insert the module so it can be loaded, and add a node so you know where to find it later, and your only an “echo Hello > /dev/my_lcd” away from finding all sorts of creative uses for your new external display.

Passive Filters, Data Transmission And Equalization Oh My!

February 13, 2012 by Kevin Dady 17 Comments

[Shahriar] is back with a new “The Signal Path” video. It has been a few months but it is okay because his videos are always packed full of good information. Some new equipment has been added to his lab and as an added bonus a quick tour of the equipment is included at the start, which is great if you like drooling over sweet machines.

The real focus of the video is high speed data communications, getting up into the GHz per second range. [Shahriar] covers filtering techniques from simple RC low pass filters to pretty complex microwave filters. Explaining frequency and time domain measurements of a 1.5Gbps signal through a low bandwidth channel. He also shows how equalization can be used to overcome low bandwidth limitations.

It is an hour long video jam packed with information, so you might want to set aside some time and have a pencil on hand before going in. It is well worth it though, so join us after the break.

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Dye Mac Dye!

February 11, 2012 by Kevin Dady 37 Comments

Fabric dye is one of those products where it keeps popping up for unintended uses, we have seen it coloring printed circuit boards, and now a Macintosh computer? [The Brain]’s project to add a little color to his Macbook has been done before, but he chooses to do it in a different way, which comes down to a little bit of sandpaper.

You could go ahead and dye the Macbook plastics as is, but that thick layer of glossy plastic is going to take much more time to penetrate and its going to resist taking the color, so it might end up splotchy. The simple solution to this is to just sand off the gloss, that way the color has much less of a barrier to dye the plastic. Once the protective gloss shell is sanded away and cleaned throughly, Rit brand fabric dye is added to a pan of water and set on the stove to boil.

While most of the case plastics are thick and tough enough to withstand some heat, care does need to be taken when dealing with thin soft parts like the display bezel. After about 45 min the parts are dyed and popping with super bright orange color in record time.