What Smoke?

During my studies I found that there were no basic tools avaliable for learning how to program Atmel microcontrollers. We had the STK500 Development Board, but this required considerable setup before using and only had LED's and Switchs.

This is what I came up with to solve this issue.



The Atmel Traning Board V1.0 features… Read More

Over the last couple of days I have been working on a Bench AC Supply. This is an essential piece of equipment that every workshop should have, some how i have managed not to need one up until now. The project itself if very simple and can be modified very easily to suit any input and output voltages.

The supply consists of five parts:

1. Case/Chassis
2. Power… Read More

It was found whilst using the original ATMega32A Development Board that there was a couple of things missing that would make life much easier. So here is is the updated version of the ATMega32A Development Board V2.0.

Overview:

The updated board has three significant new features:

• Power LED (How did i forget this in the original?)
… Read More

The time has come that i have run out of shelving in my workshop again, hence here is an article about building your own shelves.



This project covers the construction of a set of heavy duty steel shelves for the workshop. This project will follow through the design of the shelves using SolidWorks through to the actual construction of the… Read More

The terms dBi, dBm and mW are all measurements used when talking about wireless communications. The terms dBm and mW are used when talking about the output power of a transmitter or wireless interface. The term dBi is used when talking about the Gain of an antenna.

dBm and mW

The terms dBm and mW are the two ways of expressing the output power of a wireless… Read More

The objective of this project was to create a microcontroller breakout board that can be embedded into projects. I designed a board very similar to this one around 3 years ago however at the time my PCB design skills were almost non existant, hence the revised version. The new board has several new features which add value to the design and make this board a great all rounder for embedded applications.

… Read More

This project covers a section of hardware that was built for my final year project and my group mechatronics project. This is a general purpose hand controller or human machine interface device. Overview The Hand Controller project was designed to be used within several different projects. Thus the design decisions involved made this device very versitile.… Read More

This morning the problem was given to me to create a 5v Regulated power supply that has two seperate rails. Granted this is a very simple project, but hopefully its useful to someone.



The supply has dual input headers as it is designed to be powered by two 12v Battery Packs. However it is not required to use both… Read More

Here is quick power supply that was designed for use within the Lab Power supply project (Still a work in progress). This 5v Supply is to run all the logic, Microcontroller and LCD within the unit. Attached at the bottom of the page is the PCB and SCH file.



The power supply takes an AC input from a transforemer. When selecting the tranformer ensure… Read More

After much talking about it, Machspeed, FireFox, Shadey and Myself decided to finally do it. We built a portable 6.5m Trailer Mounted Mast for Air-Stream.

The design is quite simple. It consists of:

• 2 x 3.25m Sections of 50x3mm Alu Pipe
• 4 x 6mm Wire Rope Guide Wires
• 8 x 20L Water Drums
• 1 x 6x4 Trailer

 Read More