YourITronics

I was really interested about it when Seeed Studio first announced the DSO nano on their blog, unfortunately I was not able to get one of the beta’s which they offered in a limited number at a lower price. The specs they released don’t advertise for too much power from this portable but it’s style and the fact that is portable together with the low price tag should compensate for the lack of power. And don’t get me wrong on the power issue, the 1 MHz bandwidth is still enough to cover your hobby needs. For me the only big disadvantage is the fact that it has only one channel, but it compensates with the ability of recording readings that you can later compare with the actual reading.

I would love to give you more details about this portable oscilloscope, but I have to wait until I can get my hands on the DSO nano. I’m currently waiting for Seeed to list it on their product page so i can place an order.

Bricogeek droped me an email to let me know they’re hosting a contest where participants are requiered to design a game with an Arduino board. You can use any version of the boards available but it must be playable so the user can interact with the game. You can submit your project, one per person, before the deadline shown on this page. There are some nice prizes waiting for you to win them so I suggest you start building . Good luck.

I received a kit from Protostack for review purposes, this kit is for the ATmega8 micro controller, and is probably the cheapest available with the shipping costs only 20$ worldwide,  so anybody can afford it.

After I assembled the kit, I also added a few extra parts, like series diode with the +5V supply and few capacitors for decoupling, filter choke for the AVCC, these are not mandatory, since the circuit works well without them(I tried), but its good to have it on the board.

After I changed the fuse settings to work with the external 16MHz crystal, I added a LED and resistor and a pin header, the circuit board has good quality solder mask and plating, this makes it easy to solder, it has large pads on the bottom, and no pads on the top layer, this way even when you use uncoated wires for connections which run over the pads on the top you don’t the risk short circuits.

Since the holes are trough plated, removing thicker wires like diode terminals can be tricky and you can rip out the hole plating, but even in this case the pad on the bottom remains intact, so this isn’t a problem. Although it would be better if no hole plating where used on the prototyping area.

The prototyping area is similar to a breadboard, the major difference is that the ATmega8 ports are nicely ordered, the supply and ground pins are connected together, and the programming pins are tied to a 10 pin header. I use the avr mk2 programmer which has only the 6pin header, so I had to make the adapter cable.

I also made a simple demo project with 1 LED, and 1 push button, in that project I will explain how to use the digital inputs and outputs, many people doesn’t pay attention to these simple peripherals and make typical design errors which will generate aleatory errors very hard to debug.

The demo project will get described in a future post.

ATmega8 kit from Protostack

You’ve probably noticed the pictures from my last projects… they look pretty cool. That’s because i got a new camera, a Sony DSC H9. The macros are great, i can see the particles of dust on my circuit boards, the landscapes are great, i took some stuning pictures in my vacation in the mountains.

I’m not gonna go trough all of the aspects in this review, I’m just gonna tell you what impresses me about this camera. I payed for it at a local retail store about $520 complete with a 2 GB memory stick pro duo. The camera was nicely packed and accesorized. For example i got a cool remote control, that i can use to take pictures remotely. I also got a shoulder strap which you don’t get on most cameras.

The battery, is sony, as expected and it last actually more than they say it will. They guarantee that it will last you 300 photos, but i take aprox 600 photos with one charge.

If you plan on getting one, i suggest you take no less than 2 GB memory card. Because on 2 Gb it rarely gets full, and you’ll alaways have room for more pictures when you’re away from your computer and you can’t download them.

Another good thing about the camera, it’s the 15x zoom complete with image stabilization, which helps you get more acurrate details into your pictures when shooting at a distance.

The camera also has other nice functions like many shooting resolutions, the i prefere beeing the widescreen mode. In my opinion this is the best choice in digital camera before moving into the SLR category.

I hear that digital photo frames are they way to show your pictures arround the house these days, maybe one from Sony will work ok together with my H9.

I finally got a new monitor on my desk, an Acer P223w. It looks great and I’m very happy with the performance, i mean its not top of its class but its worth the money i payed for it. I choose Acer after doing allot of research, of-course there were allot of other models and makes on the 22inch segment like Samsung that are slightly better but those were over my budget. Another reason i chose Acer for, its the Crystal Brite technology (CrystalBrite is Acer’s marketing name for high-gloss laptop screens, representing the latest in anti-reflective LCD screen technology). I own an Acer Aspire notebook, which has CrystalBrite display and it looks great, so i wanted the same technology on my desktop monitor.

Before i got the Acer P223w i was using a 17 inch CRT monitor(yeah i know, i should of got a new monitor some time ago) so you can imagine that i was truly impressed with the size and properties of the Acer. Here is a list with the main features of the Acer:

• Screen Size : 22″
• Resolution : 1680 x 1050
• Contrast Ratio : 2500
• Response Time : 5ms
• Connection : DVI, D-Sub

Acer actually build two versions of this monitor one with D-Sub(VGA) and one with DVI connector. I have the one with VGA, because at the store where i ordered the monitor they only had this version. But i don’t think the DVI version would of been any better, because most of the differences between DVI and VGA monitors are just numbers, nothing to be seen with your eyes.

The first thing i did when i powered it on, was to check for any dead pixels (i recommend you do this every time you buy an LCD display). The best way to check for dead pixels is to run a program called LCDtest (i attached a zip archive, so just click on the link to download it). What the program does is to display 5 colors on your screen(white, red, green, blue and black), this make spotting dead pixels really easy. So i ran the test and everything was ok, actually during the test i could see how nicely the monitor displays the black colour(very black).

My video card already detected it as a wide screen monitor and set the 1680 x 1050 resolution. Next thing to do was to find a nice High Definition wallpaper, i chose this nice mountain scenery. I’ve not seen bleeding issues like others report on various forums and sites, in fact i have no issue at all with the monitor. Even if it doesn’t have the 2 ms required response time for gaming, the monitor still displayed the games i tested without issues(Comand&Conquer latest versions, NFS Carbon).

Another great thing about the Acer P223W is the OSD menu, which is great. Other monitors have really complicated OSD menus, but not Acer. You can access 2 main OSD menus, the full menu by hitting the Menu button, or the E button (e comes from Empowering, another technology from Acer). So far i only use the empowering button, because i only change the display mode from Text to Movie sometimes, everything else the monitor adjusts automatically.

As a final word, the Acer P223W is a great monitor and definetely a must see on your shopping list. If you have a limited budget and you want to get great design and performance, this is a perfect choice.