WD5GNR rambles about microcontrollers, ham radio, electronics, the Internet, science fiction, and other oddball things.
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Welcome Well, as if I don't have enough stuff on the Web,
I've decided to post an electronics-oriented "blog" to replace the defunct Al's Electronic Workshop program.
What can you expect? Who knows? My random thoughts and finds on electronics, microcontrollers, ham radio, the Internet,
and who knows what else? I've been blogging for awhile since the magazine I used to work for (New Architect) has a blog (the "daily")
that I wrote to (along with the other editors). Where else am I on the Web?
Programming and consulting Electronics
Ham Radio and PIC/CPLD/FPGA Tutorial.
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Al Williams
WD5GNR Rambles
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Friday, November 7
Mousey Mousey! A lot of people use our PAK-VI to interface with a mouse. You'll have a hard time finding a cheaper high-resolution, two-axis position sensor. Some of the optical mice do 800 DPI now. So many people (including me) have been doing this, we rolled out the PAK-XI just for this purpose. It is practically plug and play. Connect a PS/2 mouse to the chip and it will track the X and Y position (using 16-bit signed integers). Ask the chip and it will tell you where the mouse is (plus what buttons have been pushed). Perfect for robots, CNC milling machines, PCB drills, or whatever. We plan to introduce a board-level kit that will drive an LCD directly in the near future. Watch for it!
17:34
This Would Make a Great... Christmas present: http://www.doublesight.com/.
17:30
Wednesday, October 8
Champaign Tastes on a Beer Budget Want a Segway but can't afford one? Check out http://www.tlb.org/scooter.html. Still about $2000 according to the author.
09:20
Sunday, September 28
Cruising...My wife and I recently went on a Carnival cruise (the MS Celebration from Galveston to Cozumel and back). Great fun. You can read all about it.
14:51
Monday, August 25
Mad Scientist Central Need I say more?
14:37
Need Help? Off hand, this looks like a good site. Searching it, I found an answer to a problem I was having a tough time with.
14:36
Monday, July 21
CD Burning I recently needed to recommend some free software for burning CDROMs. I like Nero, but if you are on a budget, you'd rather get something free. I found two programs, both of which look really good. Burn 4 Free and CDBurner XP Pro both look good. A quick inspection: XP looks nicer, but I think it only burns WAV and MP3 audio files. Burn 4 Free doesn't look as nice, but it does support more formats. Neither appear to handle ISO or multiple recorders though, so I'll still be using Nero myself.
20:55
Friday, May 23
Dayton Went to the Dayton Hamvention for the second time ever last week. A fun trip. However, there was way too much rain. The crowd seemed light compared to the last time I was there. Some blamed the economy, others the weather. This time I did not go alone, but went with N3LLL who grew up in the area. This greatly enhances the trip since he knew all the local geek haunts. I've done business with Mendleson's before (from their catalog and website) and seen their large tent at Dayton. However, the real store is truly amazing. They have 5 buildings with 3 floors open to the public. Over 1.5 million square feet of space! I've heard people say before that it is indescribable and it is. The 1st floor has general merchandise, books, lab equipment, gas masks, a giant slot machine (only $3000) and the small Parts Express store (which I guess they own). It also has a small room of PC-related stuff off to the side.
You get on the cargo elevator and stand behind the line and the elevator operator (a portly lady who is quite serious that you stand behind the line) takes you to the 3rd floor. The entire floor (and this floor is much larger than, say, a Sams Club) is covered in electronic gear, components, and even electrical stuff like motors, wires, pumps, etc. From the middle of the isle it is difficult to see the far walls. I'm not kidding. The place is huge. That alone was probably worth the trip. Well... maybe not, but it certainly was worth something.
08:21
Monday, April 28
Overdue Update Been busy! In fact, I had a mother board crash last week and it took me just about a week of solid work to get it back in shape.
If you ever need to move an XP drive to another drive, try BOOTITNG. This is a share ware program and you can try it free for 30 days which is plenty of time to copy your disk, you hope!
This is a shareware program for booting from multiple partitions. You can use it for free for 30 days. Here's the trick. When you boot from the BOOTITNG floppy (or CDROM -- it will make an ISO image) it will offer to install itself into your master boot record (MBR). Press CANCEL. You don't want to use it this way (and shouldn't unless you plan to register it after 30 days -- be a good scout).
Then go into Maintenence Mode. From there you can copy a partition (wierd, you copy the partition on your C drive and then paste it onto the new drive). Then you resize the partition to use up the available space (or as much space as you want). Finally you go into the properties for the new partition and mark it active and write a standard MBR (which is not the BOOTITNG MBR).
Shut down the computer, remove the old drive and put in the new drive (setting master/slave as appropriate). Bingo. 120MB system drive in under 2 hours!
I had tried this with Western Digital's DLG 10.0 which is supposed to do it. After about 4 hours of copying the data, at the end, it would tell me I didn't have a valid NTFS volume! You'd think they'd check that BEFORE doing the 4 hour copy! The volume works fine. It was probably formatted under a Beta Win2000 and upgraded to the new NTFS, so the ID is probably funny, but XP uses it with no trouble. So much for DLG 10.0. I had e-mailed WD about the problem and still haven't had a reply. A few notes:
1) Don't boot XP with the new drive connected until you do the above. It will write a signature to the disk and then it will try to mount that disk as drive X where X was the first free drive you had at the time of that first boot.
2) Don't put the original boot drive back in until you get the above working (if at all). The drives will have the same signature and XP will get mighty confused. If you want to reinstall the old drive, wait until everything is working again. Put in the old drive and then run BOOTITNG again. On the old drive use the Maintenance menu to zero the drive's signature. When you boot XP, XP will give it a new signature and won't realize it is a drive it already knows about.
07:56
Thursday, January 16
Hardware Documents Some interesting PDF documents at http://www.oselectronics.com/downloads.htm
QRP Transmitter Design 300 kb
Winding and Using Toroids 306 kb
US Amateur Radio Bands courtesy of ARRL 39 kb
Direct Conversion Receivers 66 kb
All About Broadband Transformers 57 kb
Tutorial on building PC Boards 349 kb
All About Capacitors 293 kb
A One Tube QRP Transmitter 514 kb
All About Coils, Transformers and Relays 465 kb
All About Diodes 77 kb
Design Tips For Simple Superhet Receivers 341 kb
Designing And Using VFOs 334 kb
Introduction To Resistors 134 kb
Introduction To Transistors 178 kb
One Tube Transmitter For 40M Or 80M courtesy of the ARRL 429 kb
Schematic Symbols 65 kb
Simple Crystal Radio Set 100 kb
Understanding Scientific Notation 154 kb
AM Receiver using the ZN414Z IC 19kb
Economy Shortwave Receiver
One Watt CW Transmitter
A Homemade Isolation Transformer to Cure H-K Shorts
Tutorial on OP Amps
17:09
Tuesday, January 14
Simple Electronics Project If you have a PDA (especially one with Windows CE) you know what a problem battery life is. I have a Casio E-100 and an AudioVox Maestro (just a Toshiba E570 with half of the memory taken out). These both have the same plug as an iPaq. Radio Shack sells these connectors (274-1532) in packs of 2. They also make a really neat enclosed AA battery holder that has a switch built into it (270-409). I also used a 1N4001 and a bit of heat shrink tubing.
The PDA's center pin is + and the ring is ground. Here are the basic steps (you can probably guess):
- Remove the plug sleeve and thread the battery pack wires through it so that the back of the sleeve faces the pack.
- Solder the banded end of the 1N4001 (or any similar diode) to the center pin of the plug. Hook the wire so that it passes from the "inside" of the plug to the outside. Get the body of the diode as close as possible to the plug body. Keep in mind that the sleeve has to fit over this, so you want the center line of the diode to pretty much be on the center line of the plug. Trim the excess wire as close as possible. You might want to test fit the sleeve when you are done.
- Thread a bit of heatshrink over the red wire. It should be enough to cover the uninsulated part of the wire plus the uninsulated part of the diode you will leave behind (see next step). Double check that you have the sleeve the right way and the battery wires passing through it.
- Loop a bit of the red wire over the diode's non-banded end. Get it close to the diode body and solder. Cut the wire close. Try to keep the diode wire straight and just make a small loop out of the battery wire. The heat shink will have to fit over this joint, so neatness counts.
- Solder the black battery wire to the "ring" part of the jack.
- Slide the heat shrink over the connection where the red wire meets the diode. Shrink it with your soldering iron (don't use the tip, use the heat from further back) or a hair dryer.
- Crimp the strain relief gently so it grips the diode assembly. Reassemble the plug.
- Install 4 AA alkaline batteries. Use a wire or paper clip to touch the inside of the plug and measure the voltage with a voltmeter.
- Curse and panic when the meter reads 0V. Then remember that the box has an on/off switch and turn it on.
- If your voltmeter reads about 5.5V or so with the red lead on the center pin, you are done. Go try it on your PDA. Under load, the voltage will drop a bit and both of my PDAs don't seem to mind a bit of extra voltage.
I was afraid that without the diode the 6+ volts from fresh batteries might be too much, but I'm not sure. It also would prevent the pack from draining a battery with higher voltage although that doesn't seem to be a problem on these PDAs. If you wanted to use rechargeable cells (usually about 1.2V each) you could, but the voltage would be less. You might try omitting the diode or using a Schottky diode (which drops about .3V instead of .6 or .7 with the silicon diode I used).
Have fun, and remember: if you blow up your PDA, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE! DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK.
I HEREBY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS CIRCUIT, INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL I BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE CONSTRUCTION, USE, OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS HARDWARE.
Oh yeah, and void where prohibited by law.
08:35
Wednesday, January 1
World Domination
Happy New Year... Here's something a bit ... um... risky:
17:39
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