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 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 [...]
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 The Mail Light hardware could easily be modified to turn on some rotary warning lights, such as these lights from Woot.com. The example pictures below show the modification of a set of these lights to be driven by a U401 which works just as well as the [...]
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 In this, the third part of the Mail Light project, I describe how the core routines were implemented. The core routines revolve around a timer that flashed the LEDs, four timers that check for email at a certain rate, and the REALbasic objects that manage the pop [...]
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 The idea behind the Mail Light project is to indicate the presence of emails that are currently on my email server with a flashing LED. I am often not right at my desk and I would like to know if I have email. Or I am near [...]
This is a quick post showing a U401 (#CGU401) driving 16 LEDs. 12 of the LEDs are available here from CircuitGizmos. The square LEDs that are amber colored are just some extras that I had on hand.
If you use solderless prototype boards (solderless breadboards) for circuit testing, the USBmicro U401 (#CGU401) combined with a 30-pin header (#CGPINHEAD30) is a great way for you to connect a test circuit built on a solderless prototype board to your PC. The one-tenth inch on center pin spacing of the U401 lends itself well to [...]
