I recently saw a post on Hackaday about a course in MIT where the students get to build an FMCW radar from mainly off-the-shelf components. I got pretty excited about it and immediately thought that I wanted to build a better one from [...]
I had some space left on a PCB panel I was ordering so I quickly whipped up a return loss meter based on an AD8319 logarithmic detector from Analog devices. The AD8319 is specified up to 10GHz. The circuit has a [...]
I wanted to listen to HF bands using my RTLSDR USB dongle. Since the RTLSDR dongle can only receive from around 64MHz upwards I needed an up-converter which converts the HF band (0-50MHz) to a higher frequency I can receive [...]
I recently ordered an EzTV666 USB DVB-T stick from eBay. People have found out you can use these sticks as Software Defined Radios (SDR) which can receive radio signals in a very wide range of frequencies. The particular model I got has RTL2832 chip [...]
A few weeks ago I was on a junkyard that had a decent amount of telecommunications equipment. Mainly racks of old cellphone 3G (I think) basestations from which I got a load of some interesting RF stuff. I also found [...]
Here’s a quick project I made in couple days or so. It is a push-pull step-down laser diode driver based on LT1683 SMPS controller chip from Linear Technology. The circuit works with 12-18V input and can put out about 1A to [...]
I spent the whole yesterday battling with an ATMega16U4 microcontroller. I was trying to set the fuses to use the internal RC-oscillator instead of the external crystal oscillator. In the end I had to modify my avrdude.conf but the problem [...]
I have added support for single-track gray encoders to my Inkscape optical rotary encoder disk generator extension. In a nutshell single-track gray encoders are similar to binary-reflected gray encoders because they give absolute position with multiple sensors, and two adjacent positions can [...]
I ordered a set of three Yongnuo RF-603 wireless remote flash triggers from eBay for $50. They also work as a remote trigger for the camera as well (each of the modules have a trigger button). They are just plain [...]
I recently acquired a pair of HP 6632A power supplies for a very decent price (about 100€ for the pair). These are late 90s models from HP, capable of 0-20V and 0-5A. They have a GPIB port (well actually HP-IB [...]
I added support for creating gray encoded absolute rotary encoder disks to my Inkscape extension (original post: Inkscape extension for creating optical rotary encoder discs). More specifically binary-reflected Gray code encoders! Basically these encoders enable you to get an absolute position [...]
I designed a PCB for a programming box (based on OlliW’s original schematic) for the Assan GA250 gyro flashed with OlliW’s custom firmware (see my original post about flashing your gyro here). The programming box hooks up to your gyro and [...]
I developed an extension for Inkscape which can create optical rotary encoder discs in any size/number of segments. It currently supports single and two-track (quadrature) encoders but I’m going to add support for gray encoded discs as well. Post a comment [...]
I wanted to add a logo to a PCB but it took me a bit of googling and trial-and-error before I got it right so I decided to share my findings. KiCAD already includes a tool called bitmap2components which can [...]
The Assan GA250 is nifty little gyro for $9,99, unfortunately it is very hard (or impossible) to get it to hold the tail in aggressive maneuvers with the original firmware, it just does not have enough adjustments. Don’t worry, there [...]
A perfect companion for your modded Turnigy 9X transmitter is the FrSky RC system with telemetry. FrSky system supports sending telemetry data back to the transmitter module from the actual model you are flying. By default the D8R-II plus receiver [...]