In this article I show my process for doing a pre-order fit check on a new PCB design being done in Kicad. This process is easy to do and well worth the effort. You only need a printer and the parts you plan to use on the board.
There have been several recent articles on the […]

I noticed an Google Ad Sense advertisement on my site for NerdKits and decided to take a look. I don’t normally click on ads at my own site as that would get me in trouble with Google but the name “NerdKits” compelled me. What a great site this turned out to be.
NerdKits is selling a […]

While working on a variable current load for some power supply testing I discovered that I had no medium size (T0-220) power transistors. I needed one to act as the pass element controlling load current. I did a quick look in my box of old electronic gadgets for scrounging and found several candidates which would […]

In this article Randall Bohn converts the Liberlab microcontroller project software so that the Arduino platform can take advantage of the great Liberlab software and experiment platform. We mentioned Liberlab here at uChobby in a recent article.
Liberlab is an excellent lab tool for learning about analog and digital control. With a programmed microcontroller and the […]

KICAD is free and open source engineering design software, including schematic capture and PCB layout tools. There is even a plug-in that does 3D modeling of your PCB. Versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX are available From what I can tell after playing with it a short time, it is complete and well done. […]

Electronics-Lab blog recently mentioned a Surface Mount Soldering Guide available at Curious Inventor. This guide is very good and includes video demonstrations of soldering many common surface mount parts. Several methods are demonstrated to deal with various package types. If you have been shying away from SMT parts take a look at this guide.
Curious Inventor […]

DAC is short for Digital to Analog Converter. In this article we play around the code Michael Smith created for a PWM based DAC. I modified his code so that other DAC options could be tried. I compare the 8-Bit PWM DAC with the R2R DAC at various numbers of bits. You might be surprised […]

While reading though the incoming RSS today I came across Liberlab via this post at Hack247. Liberlab is another movement like the Arduino. The project is open source and has the following stated goal.
“The Open Source project Liberlab aims to help democratize educational scientific experimentation through the creation and use of a DIY digital […]

Michael Smith just posted up a great project where he uses PWM to play back sampled sound on the Arduino. His code is posted up at the Arduino Playground here.
Michael hijacked two timers, one for PWM generation and the other for the playback sample rate. His sample rate is 8KHz and the PWM runs at […]

In a previous uCHobby article I discussed the AVR Oscilloscope Clock Kit form Dutchtronix. This neat product uses an oscilloscope in XY mode to display a full real time clock face. In that article I suggested that the XY scope trick might be used to make a text and graphics display for bench projects. Jan […]