First up we have spools of 2mm desoldering wick. This stuff is indispensible. It’s made of fine braided copper which soaks up solder using capillary action. It is primarily used for desoldering but also comes in handy for soldering surface mounted components by hand.
Continue reading “Finishing off the month with 2 new products” »
We released the 28 Pin AVR Development Board back in 2008 and since then it has gone through many iterations. This week we release version 1.6 which adds 4 improvements. These improvements were based on customer feedback and we are very grateful for the feedback. Please keep it coming.
Continue reading “28 Pin AVR Development Board – Version 1.6” »
Jeff Keyzer, Mitch Altman and Andie Nordgren have created a seven page comic book about soldering. The style reminds me a little of Forrest Mims’ Getting Started in Electronics.
In any event it is a great book and will be part of a bigger book “How to Make Cool Things with Microcontrollers (For People Who Know Nothing)” which will be released later this year.
The Authors have been kind enough to release the comic under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike), so you are free to teach with it, color it, modify it, share it with your friends, translate it, and basically do whatever you like with it!
The complete comic book is available for download here:
Back in February, we wrote a post on Analogue to Digital Conversion. Many people mentioned that it was a bit light and they would like a more advanced tutorial. Well here it is…
Continue reading “Analogue to Digital Conversion Interrupts on an ATmega168A” »
When cutting leads on a circuit board, standard diagonal cutters will do the job but for a neater job Flush diagonal cutters are the way to go. The flush cutting blade allows you to get closer to the PCB and makes a cleaner cut.
These are now available in our tools section for just $8.50.
Last week, one of our customers, Martin Ederveen showed us what he made with his ATMEGA168 Experimenter’s Kit, an LCD clock.
Many AVR microcontrollers are capable of doing Analogue to Digital Conversion. The ATmega168 has 6 ports (8 ports on the SMD packages) that can be used for analogue input. This tutorial shows you how.
Continue reading “Analogue to Digital Conversion on an ATmega168” »
The NE555 was designed in 1970 by Hans Camenzind and to this day remains an incredibly versatile chip.
Jeri Ellsworth and Chris Gammell have put together a 555 design contest. There are 5 different categories and many prizes. including a Protostack ATMEGA168 Development Kit and USBASP Programmer.
Entries are due March 1st and will be judged by Hans Camenzind and Forrest Mims. For more information, please go to http://www.555contest.com
Sometime last year we ran out of ATmega8 microcontrollers. These became obsolete and were being replaced by the ATmega8A. Unfortunately we have seen huge shortages in AVR microcontrollers over the last 18 months and the new ATmega8A was no different.
Whilst shortages still continue, we have managed to get hold of some ATmega8As in the PDIP package (ATMEGA8A-PU). They are available on their own for $3.90 or as part of a development kit for $18.50. To be fair to everyone we are limiting the purchase of the ATmega8As to a maximum of 5 per order.
We’ll start off with DC Panel mount Jacks. These are similar to the DC Jacks that we bundle with the ATMEGA168 Development Kits, except they have a panel mounting. Simple drill a hole in your panel, pop these in and screw them into place.
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