Analog signal processing horror
No words. Every cable is an antenna…
(Click for larger)
Tobis Blog
HARDWARE DEFINED SOFTWARE
What you get for your money…
I’m currently (also) designing a digital logic analyzer with a target maximum frequency of about 100MHz. To cut the story short; I received my “special” parts from SEGOR today. Incredibly I payed about 44€ for these 2 ICs. The first is a Cypress CY7C1347G-133AXC 128k * 36 static RAM; which can take up to 133MHz clock rates (static because I don’t like [and can't take care of] refresh cycles…). The second is of course the Altera EPM570 CPLD (for up to 300MHz clock).
Today these beauties arrived in a quite big box (which made me think of why they send such a giant parcel) but as i unwrapped it… but see for yourself…
Playing with lasers
I remembered to have a old HeNe laser tube laying around which I got for some bucks some years ago … at the Ham Radio fleamarket. I don’t own a neon transformer so it was pretty much laying ’round without any use. I rediscovered it today and I decided to hook it up to my 15kV (AC) high tension transformer. I used a 1k470 series resistor to keep “power down”.
Pics… (klick for high res!)
Update
No action here lately… so that’s a quick update…
1) UsbProg
My favourite allround-programmer…
I am still developing (selfless- and restlessly) my reflow oven (5 freely programmable phases and 130 profiles storagable on the oven itself… coming soon). Howsoever I put my reflow-controller PCB on a USB-stick with some metal casing… Which did not kill my reflow controller but the UsbProg instead…
The mega32 used on the UsbProg must have been completely fried; the bootloader flashed some LED helplessly but my PC didn’t recognize the USB-device anymore. I was unable to flash the IC using my STK500 so … with other words… destroyed. So I ordered a new UsbProg and I exchanged the damaged M32 on the old one, which was a success, it works great again!
Here are some pictures of the “birth” of my second UsbProg (click for larger image)…
The re-born UsbProg and the new one…
The UsbProg PCB and all the supplied parts. Just solder these together…
…which then will look like this. (There’s only one rule: “populate everything from top side”).
So I do now own 2 UsbProgs… which can flash each other just using a standard 10-pole-cable
It works…
-> http://www.embedded-projects.net/index.php?page_id=135
2) CNC Vision System
I saw a video by Hossmachine on YouTube in which he used a standard USB-webcam to find the zero-points on his CNC. I liked the idea so I went to ebay…
Searched and found…: EBAY
You get a “12MP USB Webcam” for about 4€ which is not much. I ordered 2 pcs just in case one wasn’t working. But (after some days of patience-training (Hong Kong)) both arrived and were OK.
So we were left with some serious teardown-action. I will mount the cam on the CNC and that case doesn’t look like a lot of protection against water… plus I want to mount an adjustable focus using a servo or something similar.
Intrestingly the cam has more functions than implemented on the casing… If you connect 2 contacts the cam will take a picture. But… 12 megapixels is as far from the cam as a bicycle from a 747…
Pics…
The Cam from China
“Dismantled”
and a macro (ca 2cm distance) …
Joa. Stay tuned.
Finepitch SMDs, FR4 and 36°
Michi and I discussed whether it is possible to mill finepitch-SMD footprints (as used with LQFP64 packages) with the CNC… Michi had already tried and told me that he “only saw stripes of FR4″. So I put in a 36° engraving bit and here’s how it turned out. (Remember this is just a proof of concept, it doesn’t look quite “usable”…)
