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Archive for the ‘Electronics.’ Category

Nitelite upgrade — another RGB thingy

February 28th, 2010

A few days ago I visited my parents. The main purpose was to ‘deposit’ my new Lecroy WaveAce224 DSO. I bought it as a gift for myself, but I haven’t fulfilled all criteria to receive the gift yet. Therefore my parents are ‘guarding’ it for me until I’m allowed to have it. As Lecroy were [...]

robert Arduino., Electronics. , , , , , , , ,

My stupid intelligent washing machine

January 25th, 2010

I’m trying to save money.
Heating up water with electricity is madness. It costs a fortune and most likely fossil fuels were burned for that before. So why not use my gas/water heater and a simple bucket for getting warm water into my washing machine ? It only comes with a hose for cold water. The [...]

robert Electronics.

Macroblock LED driver group buy

December 29th, 2009

I’ll be placing an order at Kingelectronics on January 14th 2010.
To my knowledge Kingelectronics is currently the sole distributor for Macroblock LED drivers in the western world. They have quite a few interesting chips, e.g. the MBI5168. It’s an 8bit shift register with included constant current sink drivers. Just one external potentiometer is enough to [...]

robert Electronics. , , , , , ,

Playing with the OSCCAL register of an ATmega168

December 25th, 2009

I was having problems with the “led ring” boards. Their internal oscillators were not ticking with the same speed and required constant re-syncing. I tried to improve the situation by recalibrating by adjusting the OSCCAL registers. Recalibration can be done quite easily with an oscilloscope. Either assuming that the _delay_ms() routine is reasonably correct for [...]

robert Arduino., Electronics. , , , , ,

LT1618 at work — A versatile boost converter

December 18th, 2009

Please make sure you check the schematic, as this one may contain errors! I shall not be responsible for any damage to your chip. This post is about the experimentation phase only. Best to start from the spice model provided by Linear and make your own modifications to it.

I took the schematic directly from [...]

robert Electronics. ,