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Entries from Spiff's Electronics Notebook tagged with 'Howto'


Arduino and Freescale MPX Pressure sensors (April 29, 2008)

Freescale makes a range of integrated pressure sensors with 0-5V analog outputs, in a vast array of configurations. Today, I've picked the MPXV5010DP, but you should be able to adapt this to a range of sensors.

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Posted by spiffed at 12:10 AM | Comments (0)

Build a MaxSerial Freeduino (April 9, 2008)

About

The MaxSerial is a MAX232 based serial board compatible with the Arduino environment.

Buy

I'm pleased to offer these as a kit, bare PCB, and fully assembled. Use the below options to purchase with-out the optional 3.3 volt supply or explore your other options.

Full Kit Board Only Fully Assembled

Continue reading "Build a MaxSerial Freeduino"


Posted by spiffed at 2:40 AM

A High-Volume Atmega Arduino Programmer and Tester (April 1, 2008)

I need to program several dozen Atmega168s and I only own ICSP Atmel programmers; what to do? Bodge one up of course. Best of all, the bodged programmer functions as an Arduino test bed.

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Posted by spiffed at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)

Restricting via placement in Eagle (February 26, 2008)

Vias are a useful tool when laying out a pcb, but if there's a via in the middle of your text, the effect isn't pretty. This is an especially common occurrence when using and auto-router.

There are a few solutions to this, the easiest is not caring. A harder to execute, but similar solution is to integrate the via into your text.

Finally, in eagle, you can use the vRestrict layer to keep via's out of your text.

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Posted by spiffed at 8:15 PM | Comments (0)

EEPROM read/write code for CC5X (January 30, 2008)

CC5X may already include internal-EEPROM handling code, but I couldn't find any. With this in mind, here are two short methods for writing and reading from the EEPROM in many PIC microcontrollers. (Based on Microchips datasheets and .)

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Posted by spiffed at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

Repairing a KITSRUS Kit 150 for ICSP (January 29, 2008)

In the beginning, I fell in love with the Kitsrus Kit 150 PIC programmer for it's socketed automatic programming mode. The kit was priced right, supported most of the chips I encounter, and available locally. Over the years, I've ended up with five of them.

Recently, I discovered none of them function for ICSP or 40-pin parts. (Normally I use a JDM2 clone for ICSP, this was the first test of the K150.)

Obviously, some investigation was in order.

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Posted by spiffed at 8:39 PM | Comments (0)

Digital Input to the PIC16F628 in C (March 26, 2005)

I recently mentioned that I could not convince C to read from PORTA of a PIC. I have seen the error of my ways. The only thing missing from my code was a single line to disable analog functions on PORTA. inserting CMCON = 0x07; into the top of main() nicely fixed the mysterious I/O failures.

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Posted by spiffed at 12:46 PM

Blinkin' PIC (March 24, 2005)

This is a simple "welcome to the scary world of microcontrollers" circuit that counts up and down between 0 and 0xFF based on a PIC16F628, some LEDs and a 6V battery.

It could serve as a nice "welcome to the fun world of soldering", "welcome to the 2-bit world of binary", or (as I mentioned) "welcome to the scary world of microcontrollers" or, it might only be something with pretty flashing lights.

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Posted by spiffed at 9:23 PM

Biasing a FET (March 13, 2005)

FET

So your building some sort of a N-MOSFET as a switch circuit, you wire the FET between the load and the ground (or source), then apply the source voltage to the gate, and the FET switches on a bit. Congratulations, your FET is incorrectly biased.

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Posted by spiffed at 1:55 PM