A couple of weeks ago, I showed an example of using the open source MCP2210 Library I created earlier to communicate with the MCP23S08 port expander under Linux. In this post, I will provide another example of using the library…
I made a few minor tweaks to the open source MCP2210 library during the past few days, and had also updated the documentation. In my previous post, I illustrated how to manipulate the GPIO pins using this library and today…
Over the past couple of weeks, I had been busy playing with Microchip‘s MCP2210 USB to SPI converter. I was planning to create a Linux based API since Microchip only provided the Windows version. What I quickly found out though…
A few of weeks ago, I wrote about a couple of cheap webcams I bought from Amazon. Since the focal lengths of those two seemingly identical webcams are different, I could not use them in stereo vision experiments as I…
For a lot of electronics enthusiasts and DIYers, hand-soldering SMT components can be a great challenge. And given the trend of component miniaturization, a lot of ICs no longer come with DIP packaging. Soldering such small components by hand without…
In this post I will show you a simple Zenner diode tester circuit, when coupled with a PWM generator it can be used to measure the breakdown voltage of Zener diodes. Or more generically, it can be used to measure…
I got a used 250VA power transformer that was removed from equipment a couple of weeks ago. The transformer has a dual 10V AC output and a few auxiliary voltage outputs. The 10V winding is rated at 10A, I thought…
This topic is nothing new and there are already quite a few good articles on the web on this. But I thought I would try to provide a more comprehensive view on this issue and give a few concrete examples…
Last week, I received two of the demo boards from Renesas. One is a YRPBRL78G13 and the other is a RPBRX62N. The RL78/G13 promotional board features a 64 pin R5F100LEA 16-bit microcontroller, which has 64K flash ROM, 4K data flash…
I have built quite a few (1,2,3) temperature measurement circuits in the past, but none of those has remote sensing capability. So I decided to make a wireless temperature sensor so that temperature measurements can be made anywhere within the…
I received my STM32F4-Discovery evaluation board last week. So I setup the required development environments and did a quick test.
Last time I showed a simple circuit that can be used to measure unknown thermistor parameters. The circuit is basically just a power MOSFET using a voltage and duty cycle controlled PWM signal to drive the gate and thus generates…
Over the years, I have gathered quite a few NTC and PTC thermistors. But most of them are unmarked so it would be difficult to use them in an accurate way without knowing the parameters. So I decided to build…
Typically a synchronous camera flash (e.g. slave flash) is triggered via an SCR. In this blog post, I will show you a circuit that can be used to trigger a secondary camera flash using an IGBT.
Many of the modern chips such as MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes only come in surface mount versions and many of them come in fine pitch LGA or QFN packaging. This has created a significant challenge for people who just wanted…