Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I had been having some issues with my wireless connection at home. My suspicion was that this is an inherent issue with either 2701HG-B hardware or firmware. Continue reading ‘Wireless Woe Solved’ »
The other day, I needed to measure the AC current of my water heater without having to disconnect the wiring. Typically, you would need a clamp meter to do this. Since I don’t have a clamp meter, I thought I would just make a simple current transformer myself. Continue reading ‘Simple Current Transformer’ »
It seems that the 2701HG-B gateway AT&T uses for its DSL customers has some issues with its wireless mode. I have noticed that my gateway drops connections seemingly randomly once a while but never thought it was related to the wireless connections. Continue reading ‘2701HG-B Issues’ »
After I built my first Pinguino, I decided to do some experiments on using crystals of different frequencies. By default, Pinguino uses a 20 Mhz crystal, since most of the crystals I have run at 16 Mhz I decided to dig a little deeper to see whether I could make Pinguino bootloader run at frequencies other than 20 Mhz. Continue reading ‘Alternative Crystal Frequency For Pinguino’ »
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was in the process of building tools necessary to bootstrap the hardware needed for PIC development. So far, I have built a simple parallel port programmer and have used it to flash the firmware for the USBPICProg programmer I built later on. Continue reading ‘First Pinguino Build’ »
I have built some circuits that interface with computer USB ports. On several occasions, I had built the circuits but for whatever reason they did not seem to work. Since most USB firmware is rather complex in nature, it is usually useful to first identify whether the issue at hand is related to hardware or software. Continue reading ‘Troubleshooting USB Circuit’ »
I built a 4-digit 7 segment display last year. In that design, I used four 74HC595 shift registers to drive the four individual 7 segment displays, with one for each digit. So when I wanted to build an 8-digit display, I thought about using the same design with eight 74HC595s at first. But it seemed that the soldering would be a lot more challenging on the prototype board as there will be 8 chips and 64 resistors to solder. Continue reading ‘An 8-Digit 7 Segment Display’ »
Various reports suggest that AT&T DSL usage will soon be capped at 150GB per month starting May 2. And to help users monitor their data usage, AT&T has provided an online tool for users to monitor their internet usage. Continue reading ‘AT&T DSL Usage Cap’ »
Having recently read an article on the current overall browser statistics, I decided to comb through my server log to find out what the statistics look like on my site. Continue reading ‘Browser Statistics’ »
My site traffic has been increasing quite a bit recently and my old Pentium III server is certainly showing its age. I had originally planed to upgrade my server hardware last year, but it didn’t quite go as planned. So the plan was on hold till I finally got the hardware issue resolved. Continue reading ‘Server Upgraded’ »
TCA9555 is a 16-bit I2C I/O expander from Taxes Instruments. It allows the easy addition of 16 I/O ports on any device that supports the I2C bus. This makes it attractive for expanding the number of I/O pins on the standard Arduino platform using ATmega328. Up to eight TCA9555′s can be used on the same I2C bus and thus allowing up to an additional 128 digital pins to be added. Continue reading ‘TCA9555 Library for Arduino’ »
I started this project a while ago. My intention was to adapt a toy remote controlled vehicle into a generic robotic platform, which would enable me to do some experiments with robotics. To make the platform more generic, I came up with the following requirements: Continue reading ‘Building a Robotic Platform’ »
I was looking for some parts a couple of weeks ago and came across an old TV flyback transfomer, so I thought I would build a project with it. Continue reading ‘Yet Another Flyback Transformer Project’ »
After I wrote this guide on how to build an ultrasonic range sensor from scratch, I have received many comments and questions. A couple of readers have emailed me stating that this sensor works great by itself, but somehow when put onto a robotic platform it sometimes returns random range data. Continue reading ‘A Sensitive DIY Ultrasonic Range Sensor – Update’ »
I am in the process of converting a remote controlled toy vehicle to an autonomous robotic platform. My initial thought was to just get rid of the existing circuit and add on my own. But after analyzing the control circuit further, I realized I could save some effort by just reusing what was already in place for the movement controls. Continue reading ‘Multiplexing the Drive Circuit’ »