Al Williams from Hackaday has some nice tutorials to get you up to speed in using an FPGA. “Whatever tools you use, the workflow for any FPGA is basically the same, although details of the specific tools may vary. Sometimes the names vary a bit, too. Although you write code in Verilog, the FPGA has different blocks (not all vendors call them blocks) that have certain functions and methods they can
 Victor8o5 built this interesting 50,000V High Voltage Power Supply which is fun but can be dangerous if not given the respect that high voltages demand. If you are interesting in getting some serious spark jumping action this build is for you. Best of all the main component can be found for free from an old TV. “This high voltage power supply has been designed to output a fixed voltage of
   If you have an IC with broken pins near the die normally this chip is dead but if you have a CO2 laser cutter and a bit of time you might be able to laser away some of the die so you can access the internal chip traces. Have a look at ca.rstenpresser.de for some ideas. “Since a few of the Pads already were delaminated I decided to
You need to be careful when reflowing parts on your circuit boards. Different plastics can lead to a bad day for you parts. If a part was just meant to be wave soldered the actual part may not be capable of the extreme heat and duration of the reflow process. Dave found this out the hard way when he was attempting to reflow a board from a TV that
This The Switch Lab electric vehicle kit is designed for students to build it in a classroom. It comes with everything you need to build a sporty electric vehicle in about one week. The kit starts at around $20K and is designed to be built by one class and then stripped back down for the next class to build. The basic model comes with lead acid batteries, the higher models
Mike takes apart a 10GHz Microwave Link. You can see that this is a really precision piece of equipment, the wave guide piece is very interesting. Not sure what the cost of this is but I can guarantee it would not be cheap. There is quite a lot of electronics on the transmitter which as you would expect is very nicely laid out, there is obviously a lot of things
Dev boards are great when trying to get a high pin count (non DIP package) microcontroller prototyped for your next project. There are some SMD breakout boards (you can see one of those in the picture connected to his dev board). But working with just a breakout board can be a bit of a pain since the connections to the board can be hard to maintain since the package
