I recently received a review sample of a rather nice looking FPGA development board called Maximator from the folks at Kamami.com. I’ve spent some time evaluating it and this post is a detailed review of the board. The development kit arrives in a nice, well padded box. What’s in...
A custom enclosure for the Android bluetooth reflow controller
posted by Andy
It’s a good nine or ten months now since I published my design for a reflow oven controller that uses an Android app for display and control. I knew at the time that I would need an enclosure for this controller and not just because of the obvious hazards of having exposed mains...
Nanocounter is an accurate frequency counter using an FPGA, STM32 and a bluetooth android app
posted by Andy
Here we have a good example of how a requirement for a simple tool spirals out of control and spawns a project that takes months to complete and ends up dwarfing the project that it was originally expected to facilitate. You see, some time ago I was fiddling around with a project, something to do with data logging, probably, I’ve actually forgotten what I was up to. Said project would have used an MCU to acquire and timestamp data over an extended period of time and I quickly realised that the oscillators and quartz crystals used to generate the clock tree inside an MCU are not accurate enough to track wall-clock time over extended...
A development board for the STM32F042 TSSOP package
posted by Andy
It’s been a while since I posted a new article, a delay at least partly due to me herniating a disc in my neck which left me completely unable to look downwards for any length of time and as you’ll know all too well you can’t work on circuit boards without peering down at...
Filtering the 5V USB power supply line
posted by Andy
I’m currently working on a new project that contains sensitive analogue components and have rediscovered what many before me already know, that is that the VUSB 5V line that comes out from your computer’s USB hub is noisy. In fact I was surprised at just how noisy it is....
An android reflow controller that anyone can build
posted by Andy
The story so far Welcome to the never ending saga of Andy and his reflow controllers. About a year ago I published a project writeup showing how I built a PID-based reflow controller. It featured a 640×360 graphical LCD from the Sony U5 Vivaz mobile phone and was all-surface mount. It...
Cheap China ATMega8 investigation: counterfeit or just great value?
posted by Andy
I was recently working on an all through-hole project and for prototyping purposes I’d bought myself an ATmega328P microcontroller from Farnell; you know the one, you can find it on every Arduino Uno board. The general idea was that I’d write the firmware with the luxury of 32Kb...
PCB Fail: Andy bitten by manufacturing defect
posted by Andy
Regular readers of this blog will be aware that when I want to get a batch of PCBs made I use the low-cost prototyping services available from the Chinese houses such as Seeed Studio, ITead Studio or Elecrow. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose because I’m convinced that...
