I have my way of taking notes. I’ve tried to find paper that would suit my needs. Notebook paper is a no-go. What? Just a bunch of lines? No. Regular green engineering paper comes pretty close, but I always end up modifying each and every page by hand. So I broke down and made my [...]
I’m still testing the newest USBmicro firmware. Meanwhile I thought I would document a little serial port to AVR programmer I made. The design is from a schematic on the Internet. Obviously the design was by Olimex. Note that the simple programmers of this type only work with a laptop or PC with a “real” [...]
I keep a lot of old things that I’ve made. Perhaps too many. In cleaning out boxes of old circuit boards – full designs, partial designs, experiments – I found a board that I had put to a lot of good use. Many times I’ll have a latched 8-bit port on a microcontroller that I [...]
I use a lot of the protoboards like the one sold here at CircuitGizmos for developing prototypes of all sorts of circuits. Too often, though, the circuits are created but the effort isn’t documented. Often times the prototype is considered for reuse or modification later, but then it has to be reverse-engineered. With document templates [...]
I created a tool that runs on the command line or “DOS box” that lets you use a U401 or U421 (output) in a batch file or other type of PC script. This is output only. You can set or reset the lines on the U401 or U421 using this executable file. The program is [...]
I work at my desk on prototype electronic devices. To the left of my keyboard is an antistatic mat that usually contains embedded prototypes and other electronic devices. The antistatic mat protects those devices from static discharge when I touch the mat before handling the device. Sometimes, though, I will handle the device right at [...]
I read a post on the Society of Robots a couple of days ago. The original poster asked how to connect a parallel port of a PC to an AVR in order to program the AVR. This was the first way that I programmed AVRs – before I had programming tools for the AVR. I [...]
On the Make Blog: Show us your shop! We love seeing people’s workspaces. You learn so much about them, their approach to their work, the kinds of tools they use, how they organize themselves, what of their labors they choose to display, and so on. You can also get useful ideas for organizing your own [...]
Subtitled: A story (mostly) in pictures. I clamped a plastic box in my 6″ vise and completely scratched the finish on the box. I know, I know. I should have avoided putting the box directly in the rough jaws of the vise. I bought the new vise, but didn’t purchase pads for the jaws. So [...]
