Pickit is the officially supported programmer for Microchip’s PIC line of microcontrollers. The newest revision, Pickit 3, supports the latest and greatest micros, but does away with some fun stuff like in circuit debugging. Fortunately, when Microchip dropped support of the Pickit 2, they open sourced the schematic so there are tons of clones out… Read More: Altoids tin Pickit »
This is a pretty rare combo: using a premium PCB package with the budget board house. Kinda funny. Generally these small run PCB houses provide DRU and CAM files for EAGLE design rule checking and Gerber outputs, respectively. Because I’m using Altium, I had to make it up as I went along. It gets… Read More: Using Altium for a DirtyPCBs order »
With the huge popularity of Arduino in the past few years, everything that can be advertised “Arduino-compatible” is being commoditized to such a huge degree that it can be hard to find price-competitive components that do not have that distinctive Arduino pin layout. An example is this TFT touchscreen LCD. It’s like, 6 bucks, which… Read More: Travel-PIC »
Side note: A summary of something I’ve been using for many hardware hacks in the past while. A lot of commercial machines use gears for transferring forces. Well, duh. It’s often necessary to change gearing around, though, and it’s nigh-impossible to find commercial solutions with appropriate ratios, tooth profiles, and mounting options. So usually I… Read More: Reverse engineering those finicky little nylon gears you find in… »
Like many (many many) engineering types, I have a goal of easy workbench PCB fabrication. I think I’ve done more research than most, however, and in this case, sharing the wealth means everybody wins. I’ve posted this up here in its original form, but an updated version will live at the VHS wiki so that… Read More: Rapid PCB Prototyping »
I should mention that sometime last year, I built a UV exposure box for manufacturing PCBs. It’s pretty rough, but I built it over the course of an evening to do one job, and it does it quite well. Or at least, I think it worked quite well. The idea of being able… Read More: Lightbox, State of my custom PCBs »