Heat
All electronics exists to convert electricity into (mostly) heat. It just happens to do something useful along the way. The progression on the design so far has been to consider digital issues first...
View ArticleLCA and yet more new projects
A few weeks ago I attended linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat, Australia. I’ve attended it for many years now (every year since 2006!) and the conference has always been a great place to see what other...
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NTP 1.4 works!
It’s taken a while to get back to this point, but there we are. Verison 1.4 of the board finally works well enough it will be accepted by a real ntpd.
View ArticleHakko FX-888 Soldering Station
I finally decided that the ageing cheap soldering iron I bought many years ago was probably not the best tool around for the job. My requirements haven’t really gotten that much more complex, but I had...
View ArticleProject Updates
A few small updates on the state of various projects.. NTP Server: Version 1.5 board looks mostly final now. The 3.3V switchmode regulator design has been checked on a breadboard and seems to run 1.4...
View ArticleA busy few weeks
Rather unexpectedly, it’s been a busy few weeks on the electronics front. The result has been two new projects show up, and actual real honest progress on two other projects! The two new designs are...
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More new PCBs
With a new job looming (actually, already started), it is the best time to start working on electronics projects again. No, I don’t know how that works either. NTP Server 1.5 board has been made and...
View ArticleCircuit Lab for easy modelling
The MOSFET driver sheild has some problems in it. Both 1.0 and 1.1 don’t keep the voltage of the gate below the Vgs limit, which is usually +/-20V. It also doesn’t pull the voltage source from before...
View ArticleInvisible software
The recent decision by the government to flip-flop on the wording of changes to the Patents Bill has pushed the concept of “embedded” software back into the limelight. The whole concept that there is...
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0R and you
Recently on Twitter I made a comment about my supplies of zero ohm resistors (0R) going missing, and I was asked why it mattered since they’re just a wire link. It’s true that effectively a 0R is a...
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Panels
As part of expanding my production processes, I’ve taken the next step in production scale: panelised boards rather than separate boards. The idea behind this is rather than applying paste to one...
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Testing
The second part of getting up to better production standards is testing. While I’ve always done testing, it’s usually a slow process of fiddling with sockets and checking each point with a multimeter...
View ArticleBBPSU 2.0 available now!
A quick note to report version 2.0 of the Breadboard PSU is now available from Nicegear. They come fully assembled, so you can rip it out of the package and drop it straight into your solderless...
View ArticleThe design of BBPSU
My Breadboard Power Supply is designed to overcome a number of problems with other existing plug-in power supply designs. At a glance, it might not seem to make much difference how my supply board is...
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Switching to Kicad
I’ve used CadSoft’s Eagle PCB EDA tool for a long time, all the way back to 2009 when I first started down the silly path of learning something more about making electronics. Eagle has, for the most...
View ArticleQuick look: XYC X-26Y Mini PC
A quick jot of some notes about the XYC X-26Y from nicegear: The good: OpenELEC on it just works. And by works I mean everything works. Wifi card, HD video playback, even HD Audio over HDMI works. All...
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Kicad Redux
It’s been a few months now since I did the big switch from Eagle to Kicad, so I thought I’d post a few updates on how the process of switching has gone. I’ve had to go back a few times to dig old...
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Kakapo beta testing
Well, I’ve finally shipped off the first beta test unit of the Kakapo dev board to nicegear. This is mostly to shake out what I haven’t resolved yet, get valuable feedback on the design and packaging,...
View Articlelibkakapo and Arduino
A long time ago when I started working on the Kakapo design, I had some specific goals in mind. Arduino is an excellent platform, but it has been accused of hiding too much from the user and doing so...
View ArticleKakapo status update
Hi all. So it seems like there’s been a bit of interest in the Kakapo since I sent off the beta version to Nicegear. That’s really awesome. So I thought I’d post a quick update about where I’m up to...
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