Archive for the 'Ideas' Category

Prototyping Board Contest 2 Winners

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 […]

SBBPWR2 Revised design for Breadboard power supply module

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 […]

RGB LED Ping Pong Ball Light

I did some more scrounging to create a mini Locnar using the LEDs from a Glade Light Show air freshener. The wall wart had previously been scrounged from this air freshener for the bread board power supply. Now we reuse part of the circuit board with the LEDs combined with what we learned in […]

Ping Pong Ball LED Diffuser

Turns out that a Ping Pong ball makes a reasonable LED diffuser. Just drill a hole and insert the LED. Easy micro Locnar! With an RBG LED this could make a nice system indicator. Maybe build a strip of these indicators to make several status indicators. Each server gets a mini orb to show […]

Arduino Analog Gauge

In this article I describe the simple setup and explain the code to drive analog meters using PWM outputs from an Arduino and the LCD Smartie program. I also replace the meter face to show the proper scale. Replacing the meter scale is very easy to do with most meters and can really add some […]

Adjustable Current Sink

An adjustable current sink is useful for testing power supplies and figuring out how much current an LED might need. I built up this circuit to test a new power supply I was working on and revived it after seeing a couple of related post at Keith’s Electronics Blog. He wants to build a handy […]

Doing an easy PCB pre-order check

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 […]

Arduino + Liberlab = Liberino

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 […]

Arduino Audio DAC Options

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 […]