I recently bought a Noritake-itron VFD module off eBay. Noritake-itron specializes in making vacuum fluorescent displays for many OEMs. As such, there are many surplus modules being sold in secondary markets. The module I got has the model number CU20026SCPB-T26A,…
A flat bed scanner typically uses three rows of CCD sensors (RGB) to capture images placed directly on top of the glass bed. When the CCD array scans from one end of the image to the other, the digitized color…
I picked up an HP 7044A X-Y recorder on eBay recently. This one was made in the early 1980’s and by today’s technology standard it is rather ancient. And because of this, it is very easy to interface with as…
Recently, I got my hands on TI‘s HDC1050 low power, high accuracy digital humidity/temperature sensor chip. The supply voltage of this chip can range between 2.7V and 5V, making it possible to interface with 5V MCUs such as Arduino directly.…
In this blog post, I will show you a simple way of turning your Android phone into a wireless touchpad. For this to work all you need is your Android phone, an Arduino board and a HC-06 (or HC-05) bluetooth…
Arduino Due uses an Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU, which has a native hardware based True Random Number Generator (TRNG). In this post, we will take a brief look at how to use it in the Arduino environment and take…
I just got myself a couple of Arduino Due boards. While they were released almost two years ago, I have not really got a chance to look at these until quite recently. Arduino Due is based on Atmel’s ATSAM3x8E 32-bit…
DS3232 is an extremely accurate RTC with a guaranteed accuracy of 2.5 ppm (0 °C to 40 °C), which translates into an error of just 80 seconds over the course of a year under the worst case scenario. I had…
A while ago, I did a tear-down of a Keithley 196 bench multimeter. Towards the end of that post I showed a picture of my breadboard setup for backing up the firmware EPROM (27128) in case I needed to re-flash…
MCP3903 is a six channel Delta-Sigma A/D converter. It features six synchronous sampling differential channels which can be programmed to sample between 16 bit and 24 bit accuracy, the gain for each channel can also be programmatically set from 1…
A while back, I wrote an article on how to use a CP2102 USB/UART converter chip in place of an FT232RL to program an ATmega328P using Arduino bootloader. Of course, not everyone has the time or wants to build one…
LTC4151 is a high voltage I2C current and voltage monitor. It is capable of monitoring input voltage ranging from 7V to 80V with the onboard 12-bit ADC. It can also measure the high side current and an additional external voltage…
It seems that you can’t visit to a microcontroller website without seeing a digital thermometer/hygrometer build of some kind. After all, it is pretty easy to build and at the same time quite useful as well. In this post, I…
One way to extend the resolution of a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is by employing a sigma-delta converter in software. The main disadvantage of such approach is the slow speed. Alternatively, we can use some extra hardware to extend the usable…
Over the years I have created quite a few libraries for Arduino. I finally uploaded them to GitHub a couple of days ago so that they are now all at one place and are easier to find.