Electronics

Well it has to be said, for a PIC-man venturing into the Atmel world there are many pitfalls.

The story so far...

I designed a Jtag/ISP programmer based on the excellent IsoJtagISP. I used Eagle CAD and pcb-gcode to output the design to my little Widgitmaster CNC router.

(Mind the blobs of solder at the top. I bumped the crystal loose and tore the tracks off the board during the many attempts at removing the AVR as detailed below...)

The board engraved a treat and was flawless. Time to drill... oops! I forgot to set the Z height for the "Tool Change" home position, so helpfully the machine engraved a nice straight line across 3 tracks. DAMN! Ok, fix that... drill, drill, drill, DAMN does it again! This time only across one. Repair the tracks with a small piece of magnet wire and start assembly.

I'm in the process of building a small stepper controller box to house three PICSteps to control my little Widgitmaster machine. I've mounted a 25VAC toroidal transformer inside the very small case and it outputs around 36VDC once rectified which is perfect for PICStep. But I also needed 12V to supply a small fan to keep the drivers cool and I also needed 5V to supply the logic side of PICStep.

Tyson gave me a box of about 50 odd of these little LED displays. He wants me to find a use for them as he has a considerable amount still sitting around. These are little 4 character displays with built in registers and character generating ROM. They are fairly easy to interface with via a 8-bit bus and four addressing lines, which basically means you can build a display of arbitrary length and size fairly easily.

In the next few days I'm going to breadboard up a few and see what I can make with them. :)

This is my new little cave. Since Rowan was born I've been shuffled into the garage along with pretty much everything else that doesn't have a place in the house (including the cat bed and the foot-stool for the sofa!).