Thursday, December 17, 2009

Easy PIC'n with the EasyPIC5 from Mikroelektronika


Last night I broke out and old friend and started messing around with it. I got this development board last February. I have done a little with it, but nothing of any significant importance. The nice thing about this dev board is the included inputs and outputs. There are a number of LEDs and switches along with LCD ports, serial, USB, and PS/2 communications. I would suggest this to anyone that is learning to work with the Microchip PIC.

You can use this board with HEX files generated in MPLAB and the company also offers several compiler options for a reasonable price. All the compilers that I have checked out have free versions available. MikroC has a 2k word limit on programs. This will give the user enough room to test out the compiler.

I know it sounds like im pushing the product and maybe I am, but it is a good board. Hop on their site and read about it.

Later,
BT

Monday, December 14, 2009

The Best of Open Source Hardware of 2009



While browsing a few of my favorite blogs, I seen where Make did a list of the top open source hardware of 2009. There are a lot of good projects mentioned here. Give it a read

Make: Open Source Hardware of 2009

Good Day,
BT

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Project Idea

From time to time I get the need to work on a project. The biggest problem that I have is the idea of what to work on. Well this past week I got an idea of something to work on thanks to my friend Luke. He is a budding filmmaker and is in need of some high tech camera rigging. We decided to collabrate on a Pan/Tilt mount for a camera crane, which the crane is to come later on. I know this is not a new idea, but I want to add a few spins on it

We started talking about it and I suggested to use a Wii nunchuck to control the pan/tilt. This would give a more intimate feel in the camera operation, and give me a good excuse to learn to hack on one. I plan on using a Arduino for the control since I have been looking for an excuse to use one.
A point about me, one of my hobbies is collecting dev kits, I have a ARM,PIC,Renesas,Freescale,TI MSP430, and a basic stamp. I am looking at getting a ST STM8 Discovery kit when Digikey gets them in stock again.

I will keep everyone posted on the project progress along with other ramblings.

Later,
BT

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Welcome to the first post

Hello all,
Welcome to the first post of the new blog. To give everyone a bit of background. I am a geek that likes to play with electronics and mechanical hardware. I am still learning the art of the hack and one of the goals of this blog is to help out beginners and receive input from the community.

Thanks to anyone watching the blog from now and in to the future.
BT