I’ve enjoyed exploring the night sky since I was a kid, but never did much with that, beyond looking at the moon from time to time, and talking about astronomy with a friend. That changed last year, when I got myself a telescope and I was able to point it to the vastness of space. […]
I’ve been having lots of fun with a Skywatcher telescope I bought a couple of months ago, for which I already built a power pack. The telescope came with a “computerized” GOTO mount that can find and track objects in the night sky, after a simple alignment procedure. For those features to work, however, the […]
I’m in the process of acquiring a telescope that has a motorized mount, and it requires a power supply capable of 12V, 1A. While it can be powered by 8 AA batteries, the actual output voltage of a bunch of batteries is not constant; It varies wildly from fully charged to fully discharged, which means […]
Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a post about building a serial adapter/cable for the FX-880P (and FX-850P) calculator. The design I went for was a bit over-engineered. The circuit was made of two independent parts on the same PCB; one that was a straight connection to the calculator via a 15×2, 1.27mm pitch header, […]
Some Background I’ve been collecting calculators for a while, and very recently I’ve been obsessed with the Voyager series of RPN calculators designed and manufactured by HP in the 80s. While the series included several gems, like the HP 15C “Advanced Scientific Calculator”, and the HP 12C “Financial Calculator”, the most elusive model for me […]
Almost 3 years ago I developed and published ZEPPP, my Arduino-based, “Zero-External-Parts” PIC Programmer, and wrote about it here on my blog. From time to time I hear from people using it, and, sometimes I would also get questions about whether specific PIC devices are supported. Now, ZEPPP is pretty limited in scope, as it […]
So in my first adventure with the STONE displays I wrote a simple Arduino library to communicate with them, and ported the firmware-side of the included example to my library to make sure it was working properly. However, writing that library was not the end goal. I wrote it to make it to get familiar […]
HMI?! HMI stands for Human Machine Interface, which is a fancy way of describing an element that enables the interaction between a human and a machine. In this case, we will be talking about HMI displays. In particular HMI displays manufactured by a company called STONE. What makes their screens different to regular touchscreens? Well, […]