Blog
Remember the Electronic Hits Counter i wrote about last week ? There’s a new version out, this time Bob made the counter USB capable, this means you connect it to your pc trough USB instead of RS232. The functionality is still the same, it shows your website hits, on a LED display which is cool. I’m gonna build one soon. [via]
Electronic Hits Counter > USB version - [Link]
Make a sound card is no more a complex issue. If you use great IC PCM2702 from BURR BROWN / Texas Instruments you can create a fully functional USB sound card. This sound card can be powered from USB port and has one stereo output. You don’t need to install any driver for Windows XP and Vista, because they are already inside. This is really plug and play.
USB Sound Card with PCM2702 - [Link]
This is a simple design that interfaces a PIC 16F877 microcontroller to the USB bus using the FTDI FT245 USB FIFO device. It has been designed using a simple single sided PCB with only one surface mount device, the USB chip itself. All schematics, PCB layouts and software will be available for download. [via]
PIC USB interface - [Link]
Portable USB charger’s will always be handy, lets face it these days every gadget around us has USB charging capabilities. This is a very basic and simple project, and cheap too. Maybe its time for you to build your own diy portable USB charger.
DIY portable USB charger - [Link]
Make Blog writes:
Spotted on the Make: Flickr Pool, a ATTiny45-based USB device that takes control (as currently programmed) of the target computer’s Caps Lock key, switching it on/off at 30-second-to-8-minute intervals (and flashing the Caps Lock light in the process). Fully programmable to do other desktop shenanigans (e.g. random key presses, cursor movement, etc). [via]
Stealth USB caps locker - [Link]
Today and future the serial and parallel ports being phased out on new computers, hardware designers and hobbyists have no choice but to convert the USB port back to RS232 serial. FTDI have a very nice chip that does just that, the FT232AM. This chip converts USB to a standard high-speed serial port. The bonus with FTDI is the drivers are already written for you. All you have to do is design the hardware and download the serial USB drivers from FTDI’s web site. The schematic is quite simple, however the FT232AM requires a lot of external components to get it working. FTDI now have a FT232BM 2nd generation device. This device requires less external parts. [via]
USB to RS232 Dongle - [Link]
This USB-DDS(Direct Digital Synthesizer) generates sine waves from 0 to 40 MHz with millihertz resolution under computer control. It is useful for amateur radio operators as a reference oscillator.
USB – DDS - [Link]
A second USB servo controller. This one extends Ronald Schaten’s USB-Servo to 6 servos with a separate supply. It was designed to control the servos of a robot. This device was designed to control standard hobby radio control servos via a PCs USB port. Standard RC servos need a power supply of between 4.8 and 6 volts. They also have a Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signal input which controls the angle of the servo. This device supplies up to 6 such servos with a 5V supply and the PWM signal to control the servo.
USB-Servo 2 - [Link]
To debug of microcontrollers, or extract data from the uC requires an RS232 converter, or the IC FT232, which consists of 5V TTL signals converts to a USB port. The PC is a virtual COM port, where the normal programmes can be built. This little PCB has all the RS-232 pins on it’s end. Two led displays when data is send and in which direction.
USB to serial converter - [Link]
