When I was shopping for some goodies at All Electronics I came across a circuit card they were selling for $1. Description indicated that the board included two voltage regulators, a crystal and assorted parts. I like to scrounge and look up the parts used in consumer electronics so I purchased one of these […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

uCHobby’s first electronics kit is a handy breadboard power supply. The power supply design is simple but just what I needed for my electronics projects. I have seen several similar power supply boards but none had all the features I wanted. This design was also a good first project to help me learn about […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]