Making The Most Of Your Diy Development Boards

October 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Rajendra] built a rather impressive development board based around a PIC microcontroller. At its center, he’s got a PIC 16F1827 chip, but we think the design is easily adapted to your microcontroller of choice.

The I/O pins on the microcontroller aren’t actually connected to any of the components on the board. Instead, female pin headers neatly organize the pins grouped by their register. Jumper wires make for quick connections to all of the available peripheral devices. There’s an additional header for connecting the PICKit programmer, and the small blue breadboard lets you add your own components to the mix, or lets you utilize the board with a different microcontroller.

[Rajendra] took the time to carefully label all of the connectors, removing the guesswork (or pin counting) from the setup process. Many of the peripherals are i2c devices, and there’s a pin header to connect more, or to sniff the data using a Bus Pirate or other tool.

Quick And Easy DIY PIC Development Board

October 5, 2011 by Mike Nathan 27 Comments

diy_pic_dev_board

A few months back, [Phil] was looking to get into PIC development, but he couldn’t seem to find a simple development board for the PIC16F883 microcontroller he wanted to use. Since no retail offering had exactly what he was looking for, he decided to put together a dev board of his own.

He spent a couple hours in Eagle, putting together a simple board layout. [Phil] then busted out the iron and copper clad, making his dev board a reality using the tried and true toner transfer method.

He says that the board itself is quite simple, consisting of little more than the PIC, an LM1117 linear voltage regulator, and all the pin headers you could possibly need. While very basic and not necessarily a hack, we do like seeing people make their own tools when the market doesn’t provide what they want.

If you have been looking around for a simple PIC development solution, be sure to swing by [Phil’s] site – all of the schematics and layout files are free for the taking.

Makita Jobsite Radio Gets A Few Extra Bells And Whistles

October 4, 2011 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Jose] added several features to a Makita AM/FM jobsite radio, and did such a good job that you can’t tell they weren’t originally part of the design. The original radio has a compartment for a battery pack used with Makita’s line of rechargeable tools, and offers AM/FM radio, as well as auxiliary audio playback via a pair of speakers. [Jose] augmented those speakers by adding a pair of tweeters as well.

Next on his list of features were a couple of power bus add-ons. In the image on the right you can see the results of adding an automotive cigarette lighter to the side of the unit. Opposite this you’ll find a pair of USB ports that are activated by a lighted toggle switch. The ports are part of a USB car charger that is patched into the battery with a flip of that switch.

Finally, there’s a built-in Bluetooth audio receiver that connects to the auxiliary input. As shown in the image on the left, he can now play tunes from his cellphone without the need for a cord. See him showing off the device in the video after the break.

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DIY Signal Generator Probe

October 3, 2011 by Brian Benchoff No comments

A signal generator is a handy bit of kit and with the right components, it’s pretty easy to build one. Fabricating a proper signal generator probe is another matter entirely. [Frank]’s DIY signal generator probe does exactly what it claims to, and is very cheap to boot.

After [Frank] made a simple signal generator with a few parts he had lying around, he needed a probe. Not wanting to deal with poking loose wires around his circuits, he decided to modify a scope probe. Six dollars and two weeks later, [Frank] had a suitable scope probe on his doorstop shipped from halfway around the world.

The strain relief on the probe was removed, and the resistors and trim cap on the PCB was desoldered. All that was left to do was solder a piece of wire from the BNC jack to the probe lead. The strain relief was put back on and clearly labeled for use as a signal generator probe. Not bad for 10 minutes of work.

Bread Head Makes AVR Programming A Snap

October 2, 2011 by Mike Nathan 18 Comments

bread_head_quick_avr_programming_header

[Quinn] over at Blondihacks has been working with AVR microcontrollers a lot recently, and wanted a quick way to program the ATtiny13a (her current AVR of choice) while the chip is still seated in a breadboard.

To speed up code revision and testing, she built a small programming header that she calls the Bread Head. The device is wonderfully simplistic, consisting of little more than snappable header pins and a bit of upside-down protoboard.

She soldered six headers to the top (formerly the bottom) side of the board, while a set of eight oversized headers were soldered to the opposite side of the programmer. Small bits of wire were soldered in to connect all of the appropriate pins together before [Quinn] slipped the header snugly over the top of the ATtiny and gave it a quick test. Everything worked perfectly, so she slathered in in epoxy for sturdiness and called it a day.

She says that the programmer works so well that she’s likely to make a similar header for other common AVRs too.

They May Be For Developing Countries, But We Want A Concrete Lathe

September 27, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 59 Comments

At the 2009 Ghana Maker Faire, [Pat Delany] met a young carpentry student that saved for three months to buy a cheap Chinese wood plane. He was confounded by this distribution of resources, so [Pat] created the Concrete Lathe project that aims to get useful machine tools out to where they’re needed most.

The idea for concrete machine tools came out of the US involvement in World War I. America had been staunchly isolationist before committing to the war, and production of arms did not match the needed output. A man named L.I. Yeomans came up with the idea of building concrete lathes to produce artillery shells for the war effort.

Of course, the concrete lathe project is a bit more peaceful in its intentions. The concrete lathe is meant to be a cheap machine tool for developing nations. Both the concrete lathe and the Multimachine are meant to be built cheaply using scrap materials, reduce training time for machinists, and create other machine tools in a Reprap-like biological distribution.

There’s a ton of documentation on the concrete lathe wiki like the bed instructions torn from the pages of Ikea instructions, and the thread follower. While they’re still a lot of work and testing to be done, giving some manufacturing capability to those who need it most is a pretty noble cause.

Thanks [Rob] for sending this one in.

DIY Breadboard Modules For Easy Prototyping

September 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Rajendra] got tired of building the same basic circuits time and again on the breadboard. He decided to build some simple, modular circuits on protoboard and make them easy to interface with the breadboard. As you can see, he ended up with seven modules that make prototyping faster and easier.

At first glance some might not seem all that beneficial. For instance, making a board for an 18-pin PIC microcontroller into a single-in-line form factor would seem like you’re actually wasting breadboard space when compared to the DIL package of the chip. But consider that the oscillator and its capacitors, reset button, and programming header are also on the breakout board and will not have to be built in place. There are also several I/O boards, one with five buttons, another with an LED bar graph, and a set of LEDs with a SIL resistor package on-board. These modules can be plugged into a breadboard and wired up with jumper wires, or connected directly to the same rows as the microcontroller module.