We have four winners in this contest. To support the electronics hobby community uCHobby has a give away program where hobbyist receive interesting electronics parts and kits in exchange for links, articles and by winning comment contest at the site. This giveaway contest was for comments on the Wright Hobbies prototyping boards Six Prototyping Boards from Wright Hobbies. The winners for previous comment contest on the sponsorship announcement article were announced here.

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Florin shows us how to convert a Nokia 1110 cell phone’s normal monochrome LCD to a color LCD scrounged from a Nokia 1600. This article does not have much to do with microcontrollers or electronics hobby work but it is interesting and shows that you can hack your cell phones to make them suit your taste. This is very much in the Maker spirit.

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Every wonder what is inside a toll way RFID tag? The windshield on one of our cars had to be replaced the other day. We removed the toll way RFID tag before taking the car to the shop so I could peek inside. I doctored the picture here so the registration number is not shown.

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In a previous article we introduced the first uCHobby designed kit. The SBBPWR1 is a handy power supply module which plugs directly into a solderless breadboard. The previous article detailed the the overall design process for this kit. The SBBPWR1 has been received well and we got several good suggestions for improvements.

This article describes the improvements for the second revision of the kit. The new version is called SBBPWR2.

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We have two current contest at uCHobby, both are related to the package of 6 prototyping boards from Wright Hobbies. Read more about these contest in the sponsor announcement and the prototyping board review articles.

An ending date was not specified but I think now is a good time to announce some of the winners for the first comment contest.

Wright Hobbies Sponsor Announcement Comment Contest:
Two packs of 6 prototyping boards as reviewed in this article were to be given. One for the best comment and one selected randomly from all valid comments. There have been 23 comments so far with a clear winner for best comment.

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I won a Digital Multimeter Pen from Saelig which has some interesting features. Of course it is very handy to have the display in your hand as you measure. I find that positioning the meter to read it while probing is often a pain. This solves that problem. The meter even has a display on both sides so it works for left and right handed people.

Another neat feature is a build in logic probe. A reference high signal is connected to a jack on the meter side. This voltage is used to threshold the signal at the probe tip. So you can connect the reference pin to your logic supply and it automatically adjust the thresholds. If the measured voltage is less then 20% of the reference, the "low" LED is on, if above %80 of the reference, the "high" LED is on, otherwise no LED is active.

Saelig is an online store that specializes in neat electronics devices that would be of interest to electronic hobbyist and engineers. They send out an advertising flyer with specials and new products. I won the meter in a comment contest they had with one of these flyers. I do not see the Pen Multimeter at their online store so it maybe a contest only item. Saelig is not a sponsor of uCHobby but it would be great if they wanted to trade advertising space for giveaways. Maybe they will read this, we can hope…

In this article Steven Moughan shows us how to setup for PIC microcontroller development on Linux. Steve writes the following…

PICs are great, they really are… they have great features, decent instruction sets,
there’s lots to choose from, their manufacturer released a great IDE (MPlab) what could go wrong? Unfortunately the PIC is somewhat lacking when it comes to development software for Linux, and by this I mean IDEs and compilers. Here I will be dealing with getting your very own uC lab set up using Ubuntu Linux and some freely available tools.

By the end of this article we are going to have the following…

1. An IDE to develop in (PIKlab).
2. A C compiler to develop with (Hi-Tech C Lite)
3. A PIC simulator and some utilities to help debugging (GPsim and GPutils)

This article was submitted by Steven Moughan as part of the “Hobby parts for articles” program.

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In this article Frank explains the code used in the Wii Nunchuck Mouse article. Each piece of the code is explained clearly. If you want to understand how the Wii Nunchuck Mouse works or learn about programming then this is a good article to read.

Coverage includes the Arduino microcontroller code and the Autoit scripts used to provide mouse input to Windows.

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Six prototyping boards from Wright Hobbies, a new uCHobby sponsor. This article is a brief review of the new boards. A second comment contest where you can win a set of these boards is also announced.

We announced the Wright Hobbies giveaway sponsorship in this previous article along with a comment contest. There have been a lot of great comments in favor of the sponsorship idea. I have high hopes that sponsorship in exchange for giveaways will be a very successful project and that we will see other sites adopt this idea as well.

In this article I review each of the six prototyping boards including links and pricing information. Come look at these boards and get inspired to enter the comment contest, submit an article, or a link to uCHobby to receive a set of your own.

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uCHobby has its first sponsor! To celebrate we are giving away some very nice prototyping boards. Not just one board but a collection of six which represent the products available from Wright Hobbies.

Wright Hobbies is our first sponsor and we hope to have a few more in the future. At uCHobby we are about helping the hobby community and this is true of any sponsor we feature. Instead of accepting payments for ad space we are doing something different: a uCHobby sponsor gets ad space in exchange for giving away items of interest to the electronics hobby community.

A followup article will detail the new prototyping boards and announce a contest where you can win a package of these boards with a comment to the article. This package of prototyping boards also becomes an option for the “Hobby parts for articles program”.

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