Schematics

Posted on November 9, 2012 by e8johan

Over at www.electronicsproject.org you will find a broad selection of circuit schematics. Examples range for various amplifier circuits, power supplies, game circuits (remember the steady-hand-game) and more. Well worth a visit!

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What does that Pin Do?

Posted on November 1, 2012 by e8johan

The Arduino Shield List is a nice little collection of pin-outs for various Arduino shields. They’ve collected 280+ shields at the time of writing. For each shield, you will find a short summary alongside an illustration highlighting the used pins. For instance, the Adafruit Motor Shield apparently uses D3-12.

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Dead bugs

Posted on October 25, 2012 by e8johan

I did not know it, but soldering a circuit without a PCB is apparently called creating a “dead bug”. The ICs being soldered are placed on their backs, legs pointing upwards, like a dead bug.

Over at the dangerous prototypes forums, the user matseng created the little beauty shown here. What is it? It is a tiny AVR programmer!

via make.

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Raspberry Pi R2 Details

Posted on October 23, 2012 by e8johan

The people over at the Raspberry Pi foundations do not rest. Having doubled the provided memory without affecting the price, they go on to deliver the schematics for the second revision of the boards.

A great platform keeps improving, pushing the limits for what a low cost hardware can achieve.

 

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License to Entertain

Posted on October 19, 2012 by e8johan

A while back, the Raspberry Pi foundation announced that they are selling additional codecs in their webstore. The Pi comes with H264 support out of the box, but MPEG2 and VC-1 (some Microsoft thingie) are nice to have as well.

Adding the simple license keys to the board configuration, more power is unlocked. Simple and easy!

However, in addition to enabling more media to be efficiently decoded, the world just learned the cost of a decoding license. More than 3 USD per device sums up to large pile of cash somewhere…

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Fatter Pies

Posted on October 15, 2012 by e8johan

The Raspberry Pi model B now ships with 512MB of RAM. Opens the system to even more possibilities.

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The Next Level of Home 3D Printing

Posted on October 15, 2012 by e8johan

The hobbyist 3D printer prints using a thin stream of molten plasting. By adding layer upon layer, a 3D object is created. The big boys don’t do this because of problems with resolution, overhangs, etc. Now, the people at formlabs has announced a kickstarter for their FORM 1 resin-based 3D printer.

No more filament spools, instead, resin hardened by light is used. This process, called stereolitography, offers higher resolutions. Far higher resolutions. In addition to this, the FORM 1 comes with beautiful software making printing easier than before. Less engineering, more quality. I predict that we soon will reach the point where home production becomes a viable alternative.

Via boingboing.

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Step-by-step: PCB-less Arduino

Posted on October 8, 2012 by e8johan

Over at the Arduino site, there is a page on building an Arduino clone on a breadboard. This trick can be further simplified by using the internal oscillator. You lose some speed, but also some complexity.

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Portable 3D Printing

Posted on October 5, 2012 by e8johan

The Ben Heck Show had an episode on creating a portable 3D printer. The idea is to fit an entire 3D printer into a suitcase for bringing to fairs and such. The video is a nice guide to the bits and pieces that goes into building a 3D printer – portable or not.

Another video of the same thing – a portable 3D printer – has been covered by ArsTechnica. This time around, a pair of MIT students did the actual build. To show their work, they created a video.

Finally, apparently Ben Heck enjoyed his 3D printer build so much that he created the printbotGo – yet another portable 3D printer. The build (and result) is covered on his blog.

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Self-printed Retro Joystick

Posted on October 1, 2012 by e8johan

Over at Thingiverse, the Dutchman known as srepmub has published a great looking 3D printable retro joystick. The instructions contains printable parts, PCB and build instructions. As a later entry, he shows the results of two days (!) of polishing. A great looking, smooth joystick!

The only non-printable part is the DE-9 connector. Personally, I would love to replace it with a Arduino Leonardo or Teensy and implement it as a USB device. It would be the perfect combination for some emulated retro gaming!

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