Blog
The MTM Snap was designed by Jonathan Ward of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. It costs about $500, runs off an Arduino, is CNCed out of HDPE, and can mill a 5″ x 3″ x 1.75″ area. Design files and BOM are available if you want to make your own. [via]
MTM Snap, a Snap-Together CNC - [Link]
Drone writes: Now you can 3D print in glazed ceramics at Shapeways. Great! I need some big HV insulators for the electric chair I’m building. Interestingly, prices are based on surface area. [via]
Glazed Ceramics is perfect for any application such as a plate, cup or bowl as it is the first 3D printed food safe material available on Shapeways. Shapeways 3D Printed Glazed Ceramics material properties are exactly the same as standard ceramics as it is produced with fine ceramic powder which is bound together with binder, fired, glazed with lead-free, non-toxic gloss finish.
3D printed glazed ceramics – [Link]
schazamp built an FSAR001 experimenter board: [via]
This device, remember, takes 80-265Vrms wall power and puts out a (relatively) clean 5V DC. According to the datasheet, the way this thing works is by monitoring the voltage of the AC waveform and charging a big electrolytic capacitor during the low voltage segments on the leading and trailing edge of the (half-rectified) wave. The controller then discharges the capacitor to sustain the 5V DC. It claims it can handle a maximum load of 35mA
Be careful working with unisolated AC voltage, that stuff will kill you in an instant. We don’t do it.
FSAR001 AC to 5volt DC regulator – [Link]
Squonk has some useful links if you want to build your own scope: [via]
- A nice HDL example of an oscilloscope using a FIFO and trigger
- A 100 MHz input stage
- A firmware development/improvement for the DSO “Welec 2000a- series”
- The (sad) story about the DSO Quad portable scope (why sad?)
DIY oscilloscope – [Link]
Andy from the UK was looking to build a simple proof of concept project which would integrate an Arduino and ENC28J60 based ethernet shield (or a Nanode) to connect with his Pachube account to control an RGB LED. [via]
He says:
This article describes a simple application to demonstrate the ENC28J60 EtherShield library. It can be run on a plain Arduino or clone and an ethernet shield based on the ENC28J60 ethernet chip (Note: This is not the same as the official ethernet shield). An alternative is to use the Nanode (see the wiki site at Hackspace) which combines the arduino and the EtherShield into a single compatible board. It also demonstrates the network capability of the board and the control functionality included in the Pachube dashboard application.
Pachube controlled RGB LED – [Link]
Here’s an open source code project that allows you to program the Arduino core into physically smaller DIP chips, such as the Attiny84, Attiny85 or Attiny2313. [via]
Arduino-tiny: ATtiny core for Arduino - [Link]
SQKYbeaver posted a linear bench power supply in the project log forum. [via]
i have been working on a linear bench power supply, and have come to the conclusion that the cost of parts will be more than what i cam buy an assembled one for, however i will share what i have come up with so far so that any one interested will be able use what i have started.
DIY bench power supply – [Link]
Arduino UNO + Google’s ADK tutorial @ – BricoGeek.com – [via]
[few days ago] ADK was presented on Google’s blog, a platform that enables communication between Android and Arduino. The downside was that the development kit costs around 300 €.
Today we bring you a scoop. After seeing different people online who managed to run the ADK on Arduino with a USB Host Shield controlling a servo or LED, we intend to play all the devices included in the kit but in our BricoGeek DIY version, with the products we have available in the store.
Arduino UNO + Google’s ADK tutorial – [Link]
Fabien wrote a great tutorial on using the Adafruit TFT display with a Netduino. He writes: [via]
AdaFruit recently released a sweet little TFT display that I was dying to hook up to a netduino: the display features a resolution of 128*160 pixels, is capable of showing 18-bit colors and has a microSD card reader on the back of the breakout board. As usual, Limor wrote a nicely detailed Arduino tutorial showing how to connect the display and how to write sketches to drive it.
The Arduino driver relies on the ability of the Atmega168/368 to toggle digital lines extremely fast, which does not work well on the netduino due to the latency introduced by the .Net Micro Framework: even when configured to use hardware SPI, the Arduino driver constantly toggles a data/command output line, rspin below, which would be unbearably slow on the netduino if the same method were applied.
The netduino has one advantage over the Arduino: it has plenty of RAM. So, instead of toggling I/O lines slowly all the time and using next to zero RAM, the netduino driver allocates a 40K buffer corresponding to the resolution of the display in 12-bit depth colors (16 bits per pixel) and leaves the ST7735 in ‘data’ mode upon initialization.
Drawing always happens on the internal buffer first. Then, whenever the actual display needs refreshing, the display I/O operations are performed using hardware SPI, blasting the entire 40K buffer. It may sound crazy but using this method on the netduino is faster than refreshing a single pixel while toggling an I/O line!
Driving an Adafruit TFT Display with a Netduino – [Link]
voltsandbytes.com writes:
I make a lot of breakout boards that I usually use in my hobby projects. Most are input/output devices but some are microcontroller breakout boards.
Breakout Board Collection - [Link]
