ElectroDroid – Your Android Electronic Reference App

February 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

Earlier this week, fellow Hack a Day-er [Mike Nathan] reviewed Adafruit’s new iPhone/iPad app Circuit Playground. The comments on [Mike]’s review turned to suggesting ElectroDroid as an alternative to Circuit Playground. Surprisingly, Hack a Day authors actually pay attention to the comments, so I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring and offer up my review of ElectroDroid. For purposes of full disclosure, I have to add that I paid the $2.59 donation for a copy of ElectroDroid without ads, and have had no contact with the developers.

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POV Clock Spins Light Filter Instead Of LEDs

February 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

This hard-drive based POV clock is a treasure trove of great design choices. Now, we’ve seen a bunch of spinning clock builds. Several of the hard drive versions use slits cut in the platters to create a display by illuminating an LED behind those slits at just the right moment. This is a similar idea but [Jason Hotchkiss] ditched the platters all together and replaced them with a light filter. The filter disc has digits 0-9 as well as a colon (not seen above because the colons blink each second). As this disc spins, the Arduino compatible controller lights up LEDs in the eight digital positions to illuminate the correct number.

The filter is made from an etched copper-clad disc. This is a great choice because the fiberglass substrate is strong, light weight, translucent, and available. The filter idea also means you don’t need to get power or data to a spinning platform. [Jason] has also designed a very impressive controller board that is the same size as the footprint of the laptop hard drive he’s using. Check out the video after the break to see his description of what went into the hardware choices he arrived upon. Continue reading “POV Clock Spins Light Filter Instead Of LEDs” →

Supercap Lights Your Way In Times Of Need

February 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 46 Comments

You won’t find [Antoine] stumbling around in the dark. He just finished working on this LED flashlight which draws power from a super-capacitor (translated). He realized that lighting a high-efficiency LED takes so little power that there are many benefits in play when deciding to move away from batteries. When compared to a super capacitor, batteries have a shorter life span, are heavier, and take up more space.

The biggest drawback of a super capacitor in this situation is the low voltage operation. The output will start at 2.7V and drop as the current is discharged. [Antoine] used one of our favorite simple circuits to overcome this issue, the Joule Thief. That circuit is commonly seen paired with an LED in order to boost input voltage to a usable level. That’s precisely what’s going on here.

The final hack in his circuit is the addition of that red LED which you can see in the middle of the board. This takes the place of a Zener diode and drops the charging voltage to a safe level. That indicator light will not come on until the cap is fully topped off. This way it tells you when the device is done charging.

Cockroft-Walton Multiplier Can Output Positive Or Negative Voltage

February 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

If you’ve already dipped your toes into high-voltage power supply pool you may be thirsty for a bit more knowledge. Here’s a neat illustration of how to build a voltage multiplier that can output a positive or negative supply. It is based on a design known as the Cockroft-Walton Multiplier. It’s the add-on housed in the plastic box seen in the image above. It uses diodes and capacitors in an orientation very common for generating high voltages. In fact, the same thing can be found in that high-voltage bulletin board. The place this differs is when it comes to connecting the multiplier to the PSU.

If you look closely you can see one red and one black banana plug jack poking out the end of the plastic container. There is also a pair of these on the other end. The multiplier has been designed so that reconfiguring the inputs and outputs changes how it works. Each jack has been labeled with one possible input and one output. Choose the desired output (DC+ or DC-) and then follow the labels for the rest of the connections.

What can you do with this setup? Check out the clip after the break that shows it powering a lifter.

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JTAG Dongle Pushes Code To FPGA After Bootup

February 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

This gnarly beast has near-magical qualities. [Sprite_TM] patched it together as a dongle which attaches to a JTAG header (we’re fairly certain this is not a standard footprint for that interface though). He uses it to push code to an FPGA after that device boots. Why? Well, there’s several reason, but the most generic answer is that some boards will not boot unless there is a chain of trust that validates the code which will be running.

In this case, [Sprite_TM] is using a knock-off board he acquired from a Chinese supplier. It’s a hardware network terminal (thin client), and as you can see in the video after the break, it works just fine. But that’s pretty boring and he wanted to use it for his own purposes. When he plugs in the dongle and powers up the board the network terminal is nowhere to be found, replaced with the code to play Pac-Man as if were a full arcade cabinet.

The dongle is simply a female DIL header, an ATtiny85, and a flash memory chip. The AVR has a software UART that speaks XSVF, the protocol used to push data to the FPGA. The data to be written is stored in the memory chip, and with that header in place reprogramming the AVR is just a matter of connecting an ISP programmer. Brilliant!

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Using A Cheap Accelerometer With Arduino Comes With A Catch

February 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

[Boris Landoni] put together a guide to using an inexpensive 3-axis accelerometer with Arduino. The chip that he chose for the exercise is an MMA7455L made by Freescale. It’s got a lot of nice features packed into it, using hardware to do some of the things you’d need software for with other chips like reporting in which direction the chip is moving, detecting when movement has stopped, and few others. It’s an I2C device, so the examples he provides will be super simple to port to your uC of choice.

But as the title says, there’s a catch. The chip is extremely versatile and you can get your hands on one for under $2. But check out the size of it. That’s a DFN (dual flat no-lead) package which means there are no pins on it. The package has solder contacts on the bottom which do not protrude out the sides. If you want to do some at-home prototyping with the chip you’ll need a hot air pencil or reflow gear as hand soldering is unlikely to be successful. We’re not saying it’s impossible, but it is quite tricky.

Of course, if you’ve got the secret to getting this done with a quality soldering iron we’d like to hear about it.