Dimming an incandescent bulb is easy. Simply adjust the current down using a potentiometer and you are done. Dimming an LED is another story entirely. When you reduce current through an LED there are unintended consequences like color shifts and dropouts. A better way is to use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM).
Continue reading “ATmega168A Pulse Width Modulation – PWM” »
Until now, the USBASP windows driver wasn’t signed. On older versions of windows this was’t too much of a problem as you could override the signature error. On Windows Vista x64 and Windows 7, it is almost a show stopper.
Various methods have been suggested including a utility called Driver Signature Enforcement Overrider or Pressing F8 at boot time and selecting Disable Driver Signature Enforcement. These approaches were far from ideal.
With the release of libusb-win32 version 1.2.4.0 this is a thing of the past. A new USBASP driver is now available; is based on the libusb-win32 driver; and supports 32 and 64 bit windows. It is partially signed which means windows still produces a warning during installation, but that warning does not prevent installation of the driver.
OK, now for the installation procedure…
Continue reading “USBASP driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista x64” »
This week we have something that is so simple, it hardly qualifies as a tutorial, so let’s call it a “tip” and get started.
For some time we’ve stocked 2 pin and 3 pin terminal blocks. These terminal blocks have standard 5.08mm spacing, so they fit in all our development and prototyping boards. This is all good, but what do you do if you need a 4-way, 5-way or even bigger terminal block?
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” »
