Superprobe

June 4, 2010 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

The Superprobe is a logic analyzer, multimeter, and much more rolled into a fun to build project. [Ben Ryves] didn’t come up with the original idea, but he definitely took a good thing and made it better. You can use it to test logic, inject logic into a circuit, read capacitors and resistors, test frequency, read the device address from 1-wire devices, and more. Interchangeable probes, choice of internal or external power, simple two-button operation, and a powerful PIC microcontroller at the heart of it all make this a fantastic tool for your electronics workbench. Check out the quality video after the break that [Ben] put together to show off the results of his tinkering.

Continue reading “Superprobe” →

Printing With Pressure

June 4, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

The video of [Thibault Brevet’s] printer makes it look like he’s actually designed a vinyl cutter (watch it after the break). But at the end of the printing process you see that the top layer was actually a piece of carbon copy paper and the magic was happening underneath. The print head applies enough pressure to transfer the blue-ish printing ink onto the paper giving the result seen above. He’s driving this with an Arduino and feeding data using Processing.

[Thibault] left this link in the comments from the LEGO printer post. Shame on him for not tipping us off as soon as he posted info on this hack. Don’t underestimate yourselves, if you hack it we want to hear about it!

Continue reading “Printing With Pressure” →

USBasp: AVR Programmer Based On ATmega8

June 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

We love our AVR Dragon programmer but it can be nice to have a cheap and simple in system programmer on hand too. The USBasp is one such programmer that uses and ATmega8 as its only IC. It requires just a handful of components and can be purchased as a kit, or etched and assembled at home. If you source your own parts the chip does need to be programmed which makes for a chicken-or-egg scenario. We’ve used the Parallel-port dongle (schematic) from Adafruit’s Spoke POV before. It’s basically just a DAPA cable and a few resistors, a ribbon cable (use and old IDE cable if you have to) and a parallel port connector can have you up and running in no time. This is also a great way to get a friend into working with embedded systems. Order parts for a few of these and give them away to your buddies.

Nixie-display Brings More Wiring Madness

June 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[Tim Anderson] whipped up this nixie tube display using epoxy-coated wires. He’s certainly giving the wire-wrapped LED display a run for its money. He ground the epoxy off the end of each wire using a Dremel before soldering them. We thought you could solder right through the epoxy but maybe not. Was this easier than wire wrapping would have been? We’d bet that because of the voltages wire wrapping wasn’t an option here. That board on the left is the 180V power supply for the tubes with an AVR chip running the Arduino bootloader to the right. After the break there’s a brief demo of data being pulled down over a serial connection. [Tim] also has some plans to add an atomic clock module to this setup sometime down the road.

Wire-wrapping An LED Matrix

June 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Regular reader [Osgeld] built a 1024 LED display matrix. This is a proof-of-concept design and he admittedly has overloaded the components. Most notably, the 595 shift registers (featured over the weekend) are sourcing too much current if all eight pins are active. That’s easy enough to fix in the next design by moving up to cascading LED drivers. Instead of soldering every connection in the display, [Osgeld] soldered the components in place and then used wire wrapping to make the point-to-point connections. This must have saved him a ton of time and frustration. We can’t wait to see what comes out of this first prototype.

HID Crafting With A PIC And A Joystick

June 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Amr Bekhit] converted his gameport joystick to use as a USB joystick. Much like a universal USB joystick interface, this uses an additional microcontroller to talk to the serial bus while monitoring the controls on the stick. [Amr’s] discussion about creating HID descriptors is clear and easy to understand. What he’s laid out can be translated to any custom HID your heart desires. Give it a try with that old peripheral that’s been gathering dust in the corner.

PartKAM Produces CAM Related Files Online

June 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

PartKAM is a Flash-based CAM production package created by [Jack Qiao]. There are a ton of computer aided manufacturing suites out there, this one is simple and requires nothing more than having your browser open. We played with it for a few moments and found it useful but still a bit buggy. Most notably, it lacks a ‘undo’ option. That being said, you can export as SVG or gCode for use when you just need to hammer out a few parts with that CNC mill you threw together.