Many years ago (September 2009) I made a simple bench power supply using an LT1083 7.5A linear regulator with adjustable output voltage designed to be used with a 19.5V 3.42A laptop power supply. It still works fine after years of abuse, but my choice of output power connectors was poor (3 pin headers, the sort used for PC fans), it’s made on strip board and cooling was sometimes a problem, so time for an upgrade!
Here’s a simple, tiny electronic dice project using 7 LEDs, an ATtiny25V, a CR1616 coin cell and a few passives. Measuring just 18mm x 18mm and 4.9mm thick while weighing 2.1g.
What’s more annoying than having to pull the USB cable every 5 seconds to power cycle the project you’re working on? Especially when you’ve ran out of front USB ports and have to reach around the back of your PC. This project aims to make things a little bit easier by using a small push button to turn the USB power on and off, along with a few other features.
Having had a Toyota GT86 for a while I quite enjoyed the built-in rev alarm and winding the engine all the way round, until an old lady made it an insurance write off. Though, I did have the luxury of driving a BMW 430d M Sport hire car from my insurance for a few months. I now have a 2006 Honda Civic Type-S GT hatchback, and really miss that alarm (and the rest of the 86, really).
This is a library for use with the Si4463 radio IC from Silicon Labs, used (or will soon be) in some of my projects. The Si4463 is configurable in a ton of different ways with options for modulation, packet format, CRC algorithms and has a high output power of up to +20dBm (100mW). The Si4463 is used in a number of pre-made modules like the HopeRF RFM26W and Dorji_Com DRF4463F. The whole range of Si446x transceivers should also work with this library.
Recently I brought some low-power Mini-ITX motherboards; a Gigabyte GA-N3050N-D3H and a Biostar N3050NH. These boards take SO-DIMM DDR3 RAM, the sort found in laptops.
This is a library for interfacing with the HID features of the MCP2221 USB to UART and I2C/SMBus serial converter from Microchip and the newer MCP2221A. The converter includes 4 GPIO pins, 3x 10-bit ADCs, 1x 5-bit DAC and more.
Microchip does provide a library for interfacing with the chip, however it is supplied as proprietary DLLs. This project aims to be an open-source and multi-platform alternative.
Orders now closed!
The main incentive behind this project was to see how much I could cram, in terms of both hardware and software, into a wristwatch-like device that is no larger than the display itself. An OLED display was chosen for being only 1.5mm thick and not requiring a backlight (each pixel produces its own light), but mostly because they look cool. The watch was originally going to have a 0.96″ display, but this proved too difficult to get all the things I wanted underneath it. Going up a size to 1.3″ was perfect.
While working on an update for my CPU Usage LEDs project I thought why not just make it into a universal RGB LED controller? The CPU Usage LEDs controller took a value between 0 and 255, worked out what colour it should be and then fade to that colour. This was very limiting; changing what colours it used and how it fades required a firmware update. With this universal RGB LED controller the host software does all the work and the controller is simply told what brightness the red, green and blue LEDs should be.
