Wide-band RF Field Strength Meter
Field strength meter is extremely useful when working with RF devices. It can be used to quickly diagnose whether a transmitter circuit is working, and can be used to detect RF signals in the environment.
Field strength meter is extremely useful when working with RF devices. It can be used to quickly diagnose whether a transmitter circuit is working, and can be used to detect RF signals in the environment.
Among the many commercial ISM band RF transmitter and receiver ICs, I have found that Silicon Labs‘ Si4021 (transmitter IC) and Si4311 (receiver IC) are surprisingly easy to work with. Only a few commonly available external components are needed to…
I have been thinking about building an LC meter for a while since I do not have a multimeter that is capable of measuring inductance and while the multimeters I have can measure capacitance, they are not able to give…
I used to own an all-transistor, single channel 10 MHz analog oscilloscope. While it was not adequate by nowadays standard, it served me quite well for many years. The scope was later sold and I had been thinking about getting…
In my last blog post, I showed you the schematic of a I2C data logger I built. Here I will discuss some sample code used for this data logger and how to make it even more flexible.
There is a popular data logger shield out there designed for Arduino using a DS1307 real time clock chip. And that design makes data logging extremely easy if an Arduino board is used.
The official Arduino Duemilanove board is an excellent tool for prototyping. For most of the users, it is a very solid platform for various MCU experiment circuits given the number of readily-made shields available.
One of the goals in my previous timer project was to achieve the ability to control multiple electronic devices using the precise time signal generated by the RTC chip (bq3287). For electronic devices using up to a couple of amperes,…
To measure how flat a surface is, you typically will need a level of some sort. In this article, I will show you a digital level I made with an accelerometer. It is extremely accurate, capable of measuring inclination as…
One of my recent projects was to build a POV display device. There are already many microcontroller based POV devices out there, but most of those I have seen use around eight LEDs and have fixed font types. So I…
Whenever I setup a new web server, I always like the idea of keeping the Apache logs roated on a daily basis. While the procedures for changing the log rotate frequency is pretty straight forward, I have seen a lot…
Well, there is an old saying:“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” After yesterday’s server upgrade, everything worked pretty well till sometime late this afternoon.
I have finally got around to upgrade my web server. The server I have been using was an old Pentium III about 10 years old. It had been serving my website quite well over the years till recently.
Standard Arduino boards use FTDI’s FT232RL to interface with computer’s USB port. Since FT232R is just a USB to UART converter, it is possible to build an Arduino compatible USB interface using other USB to UART chips.
When I was doing the clock/stop watch project last month, I mentioned that I intended to add I2C (TWI) communication functionality so that I could get time from this clock and use it as timer signal to control other electronics.