The analyzer has become my best travel companion. It’s very discrete: everyone think you are playing with a mobile phone!. You can see in a moment what are the used frecuencies / channels at your location. One of the most interesting things if to carry it in the pocket in exposure mode and walk sometime in your neighborhood. In this way you can find easily what are the free frecuencies or channels. With the time, I learned how to distinguish between different device
You may recall, almost a year ago we did a review of Protostack’s ATmega8 development kit. You can read the original review here. Well it turns out that they have been busily churning out new versions of this board, with version 1.4 being released, just the other week. This version has got many improvements over the one we reviewed. Some of the recent improvements include a power supply block for L7805 and the like, a 2×3 pin ISP port and a section for dual row headers or IDC connectors. The board still retains the same great features that we saw in version 1, like the large breadboard style prototyping area and the power busses that are routed throughout. It is available by itself or as part of an ATmega8 or ATMega168 development kit. With both kits being under $20 and the board itself under $10, it is still quite affordable.
This pocket sized mp3 player is based on Microchip PIC16F877 and comes with both C and Assembly source code but the C code version has more features and stability. The mp3 player was designed to work with compact flash cards up to 100 gigabytes. For decoding it uses the VS1001K chip and for conversion it uses the built in DAC. The principle of operation is not very complicated, the PIC reads the CF card and once it finds a file it clocks the card 512 times per sector sending all the information one byte at a time to the decoder chip. The decoder gets a valid stream of data and sound comes out of the built in DAC. The project doesn’t have a display or a fancy menu, it’s just a plain simple mp3 player.
This has to be one of the most well equipped shops I’ve ever seen. At the moment I don’t have the space to host such a well equipped shop so I have to deal with the minimum requirements but someday I hope I’ll have the space to equip my shop with such a variety of tools. You can view a slideshow with all the different angles here.
This is the last post for 2009 and I promise there will be much more in 2010. In 2009 we had some interesting projects developed here at youritronics.com here is some of the highlights:
The idea behind this project was born when a friend asked me too take a look at he’s broken GPS unit (MyGuide 3000) to see if I can fix anything. After figuring out that the processor is the faulty part I decided to use the gps module for a stand alone gps module that you can just connect to a netbook.
The TMP275 is a 0.5°C accurate, Two-Wire, serial output temperature sensor. I got it as free sample from TI and I put together this project to experiment with the sensor.
The 3 part DIY speaker building tutorial written by youritronics author Andrei, the kind of project that gets the most out of everything using inexpensive materials:
