This category contains experiments and tests, which for me usually means messing around and playing with a particular concept, technology, device or whatever. May or may not contain actual “lab” tests.
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 […]
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 […]
Tape recorders, computers and capture cards all seem to be happy to accept a microphone input for adding audio or voice-overs, but very few have a “line input” to overlay music or any other “strong” signal source instead.
I’ve had a VC99 multimeter for a while, and one of the nice things about it, is that it can be hacked to give it RS232 output pretty easily. The hack is possible because the VC99 uses a rather standard DMM chipset that has serial-output capabilities built-in. You can check if the feature is there […]
It happens that I quite like scientific calculators, and lately I’ve been adding a few to my collection. Several calculators are CAS (“Computer Algebra System”)-capable, meaning they are powerful enough to do symbolic / algebraic processing, and thus are able to understand and manipulate algebraic expressions containing any mix of unknowns, operators and numbers, and […]
A couple of months ago I was asked if I could prepare a sort of workshop on one of my favorite topics: ASM Programming for PIC microcontrollers, which I of course accepted on the spot. Now, I wanted to include a couple of “hands-on” lab sessions in this workshop, and because of this, I needed […]
It took me a really long time to do this second part of my Pi-based Logic Analyzer project, mostly because of two things; the first one being that at one point (after I had pretty much all the case design, extra hardware and software tweaking done for my RPi1) I decided to switch to a Raspberry Pi […]