Eventually one of your projects will cause you to move from DIY PCB manufacturing to getting a PCB Fab company to make them for you. There are lots of them to choose from, Digital DIY has gone through a ton of PCB Fabrication House Options and provided some information to allow a good A B comparison. “Even in small quantity, having circuit boards made can be inexpensive, if you know
The winners of all the previous contests have been announced and the items have all been added to the old contest pages. The contest this week will be a bit different, you still need to name the thing but the winner will be the first one to correctly identify the item above in the comments. Images of the item will be added above from time to time until someone guesses
I first heard about Field Day on Ham Nation which is a new show on the TWIT network. Field Day is a day where ham radio operators run emergency preparedness exercises. If there is a large event that causes major communication channels to be disrupted many of us will rely on the transmissions of these ham radio operators to spread information. Watch the video below to see how the guys
SeamusTheTinker built this Time Lapse System using a Parallax microcontroller, VEX Robotic Design System pieces and a bunch of other various bits and pieces. In the end the rig is capable of taking some great growing plant pictures. “The camera is a Casio QV8000-SX, using the built-in time-lapse mode. The motor controller is based on a Parallax BASIC Stamp 2 OEM module that I had left over from a previous
Adam Jackman and Pouria Pezeshkian designed a cool Digitally Controlled Electric Guitar for their ECE 4760 Final Project. My daughter is learning guitar and I can see that the electric guitar can have its sound modified in interesting ways just by twiddling the knobs on the guitar. Only issue is it’s hard to revert back and forth between different sounds without lots of trial and error. Adam and Pouria have
Remember the PIC 16F1937 Capacitance Touch Switch Keypad Project that we featured last week? Giorgos from PCB Heaven has been hard at work integrating the keypad into a larger project which is a DIY Keypad Door Entry System. A bunch of videos can be seen here and the build log with lots of pictures can be found here. If you want to build your own Giorgos has made the schematics
Have a look at the NANO.r00t-Ed site for some interesting projects including this LM34 Temperature Sensor Weather Station Project. It uses a LM34 temperature sensor which is similar to the LM35 that I used in the PWM fan controller project except it outputs voltages that scale with Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. There is a microcontroller that reads in the voltage and determines the temperature which is sent to the weather
