Perfect for adding a power connector to your project. We went for the more expensive “thin pin” type which snap into breadboards or perfboards. They will work where “thick pin” types go also, just need a little more solder to fill up the larger pads.
Build instructions for the ‘Baby Interface Device’ (BID), an ultra-simple USB Human Interface Device for Tiny Humans. Built to allow my kid to interact with the computer without destroying my keyboards. The BID is a DIY USB HID (Human Interface Device) that acts as a keyboard to trigger a single keypress (space bar in this case). The concept is to create a very large button that is baby-friendly to allow an infant to interact with computer games and educational software.
The project can be assembled in less than an hour for around $35 or less and requires very little knowledge of electronics or coding.
This comic was inspired by Sony, but they’re not exceptional. It’s also my first animated GIF Mimi & Eunice. Gear animation modified from Wikimedia Commons.
ThingSpeak has just released a new app called TweetControl that listens to Twitter for hashtags and allows you to control anything you want. The documentation for TweetControl is available on the ThingSpeak Community site.
Thermistors are a simple but very precise method of measuring temperature. The resistance changes dramatically as the body gets colder and hotter. Thermistors tend not to be used for very hot temperatures (these low cost ones have vinyl wires that top out at 100c degrees C) but they’re much cheaper than thermocouples and very easy to read using a simple voltage divider. They’re more precise than digital temperature sensors (those always have an error of +-1 degree C) at 1% you can get better than +-0.2 degree C. These are often used for cold/warm temperature sensing and for battery chargers.
We carry a basic 10K 1% NTC thermistor but you can also pick up a range at digikey.
Tom West, a shy computer engineer who became an unlikely symbol of high tech to multitudes of general-interest readers as leader of the engineering team portrayed in Tracy Kidder’s book “The Soul of a New Machine,” died on May 19 at his home in Westport, Mass. He was 71.
Mr. West and his team of engineers at the Data General Corporation, in Westborough, Mass., developed a 32-bit microcomputer that briefly led the field of digital processing in the early 1980s, when the computer industry was poised between the eras of the mainframe and the PC.
MANUFACTURING MONDAY! Surface Mount (SMT) Our mods, hacks, tips and tricks for SMT manufacture…
One thing is certain, if you’re doing SMT, you’re doing rework. So having the right rework tools will save you tons of time, frustration and money. We try to aim for about 90% yield off the pick and place (or better) and repair the rest for a total aim of 95% or better. The first tool you’ll want to invest in is a really good soldering iron.
We originally were big fans of Weller irons and used them in school but when it came time to stock the Adafruit lab we decided to go with a Metcal MX-500 on the recommendation of a friend. It was a good recommendation! Metcals are really heavy, durable and heat up ultra fast.
AdaFruit recently released a sweet little TFT display that I was dying to hook up to a netduino: the display features a resolution of 128*160 pixels, is capable of showing 18-bit colors and has a microSD card reader on the back of the breakout board. As usual, Limor wrote a nicely detailed Arduino tutorial showing how to connect the display and how to write sketches to drive it.
The Arduino driver relies on the ability of the Atmega168/368 to toggle digital lines extremely fast, which does not work well on the netduino due to the latency introduced by the .Net Micro Framework: even when configured to use hardware SPI, the Arduino driver constantly toggles a data/command output line, rspin below, which would be unbearably slow on the netduino if the same method were applied.
The netduino has one advantage over the Arduino: it has plenty of RAM. So, instead of toggling I/O lines slowly all the time and using next to zero RAM, the netduino driver allocates a 40K buffer corresponding to the resolution of the display in 12-bit depth colors (16 bits per pixel) and leaves the ST7735 in ‘data’ mode upon initialization.
Drawing always happens on the internal buffer first. Then, whenever the actual display needs refreshing, the display I/O operations are performed using hardware SPI, blasting the entire 40K buffer. It may sound crazy but using this method on the netduino is faster than refreshing a single pixel while toggling an I/O line!
Nice!
Source code and further discussion at Fabien’s blog.
[few days ago] ADK was presented on Google’s blog, a platform that enables communication between Android and Arduino. The downside was that the development kit costs around 300 €.
Today we bring you a scoop. After seeing different people online who managed to run the ADK on Arduino with a USB Host Shield controlling a servo or LED, we intend to play all the devices included in the kit but in our BricoGeek DIY version, with the products we have available in the store.
This is of a demo of how you can make a super easy and cheep wireless control pendant for your EMC2 machine. All you need to do is install QtsixA and set up your controller as a mouse and keboard. You can map the hokeys custom to your machine.
This is a really handy hack! If you’ve ever tried to zero a workpiece and gotten tangled up in cables, this thing is a godsend. He mentions he uses it for manual milling too, which I can imagine is very useful, particularly for cutting reference faces.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
FEED