A couple weekends ago, I was musing that among my electronic devices there was no radio - as in AM/FM, not WiFi and Bluetooth and NFC and etc. Of course, radio is not exactly the most generally useful of information or entertainment sources, but it still has some things to be said for it, such as being independent of Internet connections.

Another ( Read more... )

Today I first attempted to set up and program an ATtiny2313 AVR microcontroller mounted on an independent breadboard rather than the STK500’s own sockets. (I had until now only had chips which required external crystals - and all the crystals I had were well above their speed ratings!)
But I was getting extremely unreliable communication; avrdude ( Read more... )

Back to electronics, at least for a weekend...

After making sure to have fresh or cleaned parts, and using fresh (rather than two and a half decades old) solder, I have managed to solder several joints reasonably successfully. I completed two tiny projects:

• I assembled a WiiChuck Adapter (it imitates a Nintendo Wii controller accessory socket and ( Read more... )

I used to wonder why color LCD displays always have backlights (and when the light is off they're very dark). I haven't actually researched the matter, but I recently thought of a highly plausible explanation:

A LCD per se is just a device which either blocks or transmits light under electrical control. A simple monochrome LCD (as in a digital ( Read more... )

You probably already know about this if you're interested, but SparkFun Electronics will be having, on January 7, a “Free Day” on which you can order up to $100 and pay only shipping (plus any amount over $100). Shipping, to my location by the cheap options, was shown as ~$10 (thus “91% off”, not considering tax).

(I have no affiliation with, and ( Read more... )

This is not a complete tutorial; it is intended to collect the information that I needed to get started and didn't find obvious, particularly explaining the operations needed to compile a program, and the most basic of syntax, operators, and IO operations to use microcontroller-specific operations from C/avr-gcc/avr-libc. It does not cover ( Read more... )

I recently purchased some items from The Electronic Goldmine. I placed the order on December 2 (Sunday); it arrived at my post office box December 7 (Friday). The box was large and the contents were well-padded; I think it could safely have been smaller.
( Quality and details of the contents )

One of the requirements for the timer project is that the alarm sound be not too unpleasant.

So: What can I do with the current prototype hardware, a piezo element taken from a watch connected directly to a (digital) output pin on the PIC?

Trivially, fixed-volume square waves, by either toggling the output pin in software or setting up the PIC's ( Read more... )

Having repeatedly heard the “they tried to evolve an oscillator in a FPGA, but got a radio instead” story, I was glad to encounter (via Making Light) a link to the original paper, “The Evolved Radio and its Implications for Modelling the Evolution of Novel Sensors”.

( Read more... )