This is a sour experience I wish to share with everyone. The lesson learned: do not buy ICs from Aliexpress/Banggood etc. On my VFD tube driver design, everything runs off 12V. Everything except an ATTINY13 that generates a 5V square wave. I therefore needed a tiny 12V to 5V drop […]
There are many different kind of ESP32 boards out there; but the DOIT is by far the most popular one. It’s simple: if you type ESP32 in Banggood, Aliexpress or Taobao, it is the first design that comes up. Quite simply, if you are starting with ESP32, it is […]
As part of the process of building a VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) filament driver, I use an ATTINY to generate a square wave signal. I program these chips using an Arduino Uno used as a programmer through the “Arduino as ISP” sketch. This process is painfully slow. Every time you […]
OSH Park is a PCB manufacturer tailored to hobbyists. They take orders for very small quantities of boards (minimum 3) and they are able to do this by taking small hobbyist projects and compiling them into a big batch. A typical two layer board costs US$5 per square inch. […]
In my previous post, I showed how to build a square wave floating above ground using an operational amplifier. I originally did my test at 5 Khz, which worked quite well but gave a nasty humming sound. The signal must therefore be above the hearing range; and I have settled […]
For my next project I would like to do a big VFD display using Russian IV-25 tubes. This has lead me to read a lot about these tubes and their notorious filaments. Long story short: they are very fiddly and require a low AC voltage which is quite hard to […]
We continue to enrich the website with new content and today I am pleased to share with you a new tutorial on the Microchip 47C16 2kb I2C ram (and its 47L16 low power counterpart). It’s in my opinion one of the best chip to start with an external serial […]
What’s new in China? New maker products roundup August 2017 Here are new maker products recently released which are worth looking at: ESP32 is love Keyan Technlogy has a DOIT ESP32 board for $7.50. They are a big reputable shop on Aliexpress and it’s a good price for an ESP32 […]
The most observant of you guys might have noticed that there’s a new tutorial available from the menu: how to interface a Si7021 humidity and temperature sensor with Arduino. I went all in with this one, going deep enough to create my own library which supports all features of this […]
