The Peak Atlas DCA

Saw this neat gadget on another blog and had to share with everyone. Just connect your component any way round and press the test button. The Atlas DCA will then present you with detailed component information in concise, easy to read, scrollable pages. The displayed information will include: the component type, special component features, component pinout, and measured parameters (such as gain, leakage current, gate threshold voltages, volt drops etc...).  Imagine all the time you can save with this little gadget!

[Source] peakelec.co.uk and Electronics-Lab

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How To Turn Little Engineers Into Big Engineers

This has to be the best toy to get your child into the world of electronics! AWARDS: The National Parenting Center-Seal of Approval, Dr. Toy 100 Best Children's Products, Dr Toy Best Educational Products. The Kit contains over 60 Snap-Together parts that allows you to build over 300 exciting projects. Clear and concise Illustrated Manual will make building the projects a breeze! Build a Radio, Doorbell, burglar alarm and more! No tools required and no soldering.

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8th Annual US regional Digilent Design Contest

Digilent is proud to announce the 8th annual US regional Digilent Design Contest, to be held on May 6-7, 2012 in conjunction with the IEEE EIT conference in Indianapolis.

Digilent Design Contests are engineering contests open to all students enrolled in any educational institution in that region. Students are challenged to create an original project using Digilent boards, whether FPGA boards featuring state-of-the-art Xilinx FPGAs, microcontroller boards featuring Microchip microcontrollers, or chipKIT boards based on the Arduino development environment.

Contest enrollment begins on January 25th. Project presentations and judging will take place on May 6th, with the winners to be announced on May 7th. Attendees of the EIT Conference are invited to attend the contest. Judges will be looking for creativity, feasibility, and originality, and judging positions are still available. Please contact Digilent if you are interested in participating as a guest judge for the contest.

The US contest is one of several 2012 regional contests, including China, the EU, and India. Digilent awards generous cash prizes to the top finishers and donates the hardware used by all contestants.

The 2011 Worldwide Digilent Design Contest Finals were held last September in conjunction with the FPGAWorld conference in Munich, Germany. Participants included 16 teams from China, India, Romania, Switzerland, and the US. Winning projects included a smart shopping cart, a bomb disposal robot, and a GPS-enabled rover.

Guidelines for the Digilent Design Contests will be available at http://www.digilentinc.com/events/ddc2012/  or http://www.facebook.com/Digilent?sk=app_244940582228984. 

Projects from all Digilent Design Contests, including documentation, are available at http://digilentinc.com/NavTop/Showcase.cfm.

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Simple Chaser Lights Kit Tutorial

Joe Pardue gives us a tutorial that describes how to build and use the Simple Chaser Lights Kit. You can purchase the kit from smileymicros.com and nutvolts.com.

This is the second part of the tutorial to show how to assemble the Simple Chaser Lights Kit

If your interested in purchasing a Simple Chaser Light Kit - visit the Nuts & Volts Webstore for more details.

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A Digital Salinometer

Believe it or not, Daniel Kramnik is only a Junior in High School and has built this Digital Salinometer for a Water Quality Science Olympiad event. The Digital Salinometer built by Daniel took almost 2 weeks and is capable of accuracy within 0.0014%. Daniel's entry ended up winning him first place at the regionals and he's now headed for the State competition in March. Amazing what high school kids can do these days!

"The entire circuit consisted of several parts: an opamp-based salinity-measuring circuit, a linear positive/negative power supply, a digital voltmeter, and a peltier device temperature controller.

In order to save time debugging (inevitably) flawed bread or perfboarded circuits, I designed custom circuit boards in Eagle CAD and etched them at home with ferric chloride. I won’t post my .sch/.brd files as that would make it too easy to copy this project for Science Olympiad, but I will share schematic image files and board image files (if you already know how to reCAD them for etching in Eagle, chances are, you’re already beyond this guide)."

[Source] HackedGadgets via A Digital Salinometer

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How Do They Do That?

February 2012 Bryan Bergeron

February 2012
By Bryan Bergeron

Reverse engineering is one of the most challenging and rewarding endeavors in electronics. I’m talking about replicating the functionality of a device that you’ve seen or read about but that’s too expensive or otherwise unavailable. There are numerous issues involved in reverse engineering — from creating a schematic to locating parts. Moreover, you have to understand what’s going on, both mechanically and electronically. In my experience, seemingly simple devices are often the most challenging. However, there are methods you can use to glean an understanding of just about any device on the market.

Case in point: I’d been lusting over a guitar synthesizer since it was introduced a couple years ago. According to the marketing literature, it was based in part on filter technology used in relatively inexpensive effects boxes. I managed to snare one of these effects boxes on eBay and — within hours of arriving — I had it disassembled on my workbench. Teardowns are one of the best ways of figuring out not only how a circuit works, but how to best assemble it.

Next, I searched for technical reviews that described how the synthesizer worked. As is typical, I had to piece together information from several reviews to get an understanding of the circuit and operating conditions.

One article mentioned an external power supply, another special pickup designs, and so on. It seems that the marketing people for many companies won’t divulge everything to one reviewer, but are fine with disclosing different aspects of their technology to different reviewers.

Armed with the information from the teardown and reviews, I started drawing up plans for a circuit board that I’d embed in one of my guitars. It wasn’t much – a microcontroller, a few op-amps, a couple transistors, a 9V battery, and a handful of capacitors and resistors. Three weekends later, I had a circuit that checked out on my workbench. The next step was to test it with the guitar. Inexplicably, it didn’t work. Electrically it checked out, and in side-by-side comparisons with the teardown, everything seemed in order. But there was something missing.

Perplexed and frustrated, I turned to my favorite source of technical information: the US Patent and Trademark Office (http://www.uspto.gov). If you’ve used Google, you know how to search the USPTO database. In fact, you can use Google’s patent search engine (http://www.google.com/patents) instead of the USPTO site. Unless you need to run a complicated, multiple-keyword search, the Google site is a good first stop.

In the patent files, I located several patents that explained exactly how to integrate a synthesizer into the body of a guitar. It turns out that I got the electronics correct but I hadn’t considered the magnetics. Specifically, the angles of the magnetic pickups used to capture the vibrations of the steel strings relative to each other are critical. In a typical guitar, the magnetic pickups are mounted parallel to each other and perpendicular to the strings. However, in this particular form of guitar synthesizer, the magnetic pickups operate best when the axes are about 30 degrees apart.

I hadn’t thought of the magnetic properties of the circuit. However, thanks to information from the USPTO, I was able to align the pickups and test the circuit. Admittedly, my guitar synthesizer falls short of the real thing. That’s something I’m willing to put up with, given my DIY guitar synthesizer cost less than one percent of the brand name device.

So, when that expensive high-tech device catches your eye, consider going DIY. If possible, get your hands on related technology for a teardown, hunt down technical reviews on the Web, and spend time reading through the USPTO’s patent database. Then, you can make an informed decision about whether you have the skills and resources to replicate the device, purchase the device, or simply admire it from afar. NV

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Etch Your Sketch

"Youtube user RobertjAndreasen shows off his "Etch Your Sketch". An Arduino-powered kit that I built that is capable of reproducing a black and white image on an Etch A Sketch. The system includes a .NET application that will analyze an image, identify the black pixels, and produce a series of commands (i.e. coordinates) that are fed to the Arduino. The Arduino, in turn, drives two stepper motors connected to the Etch A Sketch posts to reproduce the image."

This time lapse video shows the kit reproducing an image of superman.
The actually drawing takes about 15 minutes to produce.

[Source] robertjandreasen’s channel

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EL Wire Shutter Shades

ch00ftech Industries shares his homemade Kayne West EL Wire Shutter Shades he made for New Years Eve.  Lacing the shades with six multicolor tracks of EL wire mounted to the shutters. The EL wire is fed back through several discrete wires which ends to a control box that you can keep in your pocket. As the video shows, the glasses function as a V/U meter based on the audio received by the driver circuit. If the music doesn't make you dance, maybe the glasses will!

[Source] ch00ftech Industries via Hack A Day

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Pulse Sensor

Pulse Sensor is a well-designed plug-and-play heart-rate sensor for Arduino.  It can be used by students, artists, athletes, makers, and game & mobile developers who want to easily incorporate live heart-rate data into their projects.

Pulse Sensor, Short Introduction from yury g on Vimeo.

There is a new version of Pulse Sensor code now up on the Pulse Sensor Code Downloads page! The new version (version 0.6)  is a significant update and we advise everyone to use it.   From our tests, it makes the Pulse Sensor more accurate and reliable on whole.

In detail, changes include:

1.  A digital filter for better signal processing.
2. Automatic update of heart rate (BPM).
3. Automatic update of time between beats (HRV) with 1mS resolution !
4. Sensor data samples are taken every 1mS, timed by an interrupt generated by Timer1.
5. Access to both raw sensor data and filtered sensor data (b/c we know you want that) !

[Source] Hackedgadgets via http://pulsesensor.com/

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Methode Electronics - Fluid Level Sensing

Methode Electronics is a leading developer of custom-engineered and application-specific products and solutions utilizing the latest technologies. From biometric identification utilizing the unique characteristics of human skin structure; to magnetic signature sensing of mechanical and electrical properties; to the revolutionary solid-state touch sensitive switches used in today's appliances and automobiles, Methode's extensive toolbox of technical solutions help their customers differentiate their products.

[Source] http://www.methode.com

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