Special thanks to the folks over at Novarm for sponsoring my upcoming book (Raspberry Pi Robots: A DIY Guide for Makers) by providing me with an Extended Edition license to their absolutely fantastic EDA software, DipTrace. As you may or may not know, I’m a big fan of Upverter and their collaborative web base PCB design … Continue reading
Here’s a very concise article on adding SMBus support to the Raspberry Pi. I’ve found quite a few very nice Battery Fuel Gauge chips that absolutely refuse to work with I2C because they require repeated start commands. Jeff Jackowski has added this behavior to the i2c-bcm2708 Kernel Module. I just put in a couple of … Continue reading
Cleaning out the attic I came across an old RCA brand VHS camcorder circa 1998. (It’s got to be one of the last models of VHS camcorders made.) I instantly recognized the parts value, so like a Depeche Mode song, I stripped it to the bone. Aside from the usual assortment of perspex and glass lenses, … Continue reading
February marked 10 years for the site (and the domain that goes with it). It seems like only yesterday I was furiously mashing a [BUY] button the second pre-registration (Sunrise) started. She’s had many looks over the years, from the original black-and-green blog (hand designed by a friend) to the very popular skeuomorphic PowerBook design (by … Continue reading
Temperature controlled soldering iron, variable bench power supply, anti-static wrist strap, breadboard, multimeter, oscilloscope, bits for every size screw, dikes. What do these all have in common? They’re all weapons in the electronics engineer’s arsenal. To help fight in the never ending war on bugs (and not the kind from Klendathu), I’ve added a new piece … Continue reading
Sometimes the simple things end up being a bit more complex than you’d think. For example, enabling the square wave output on a DS1307 Realtime Clock without the use of a dedicated MCU. The DS1307 communicates over I2C with a default address of 0x68; storing time and setting data internally in 56-Byte battery backed RAM. … Continue reading
Well, I’m starting to get settled in on the new site. Over the next few weeks and months I’ll start moving old articles, pictures, schematics and files from their various resting places. This stuff is scattered abut the web and physical media, so there’s no way for me to really automate it. I’ll get the … Continue reading