Freescale announced a new line of ARM® Cortex™-M0+ based microcontrollers, the Kinetis L Series. The MCUs are supposed to offer the performance of a real 32-bit MCU at the price and energy rating of an 8-bit microcontroller. A tight budget and low power requirements used to limit design engineers to 8-bit and 16-bit MCUs. Freescale’s … [Read more…]
When parts are being used in military or aerospace applications they need to meet special quality standards. Using off-the-shelf parts is a big no-go and should be avoided at all times. While inventorying all my electronic parts, I stumbled across a few old forgotten parts from a fairly old project which was designed according to … [Read more…]
Circuits with flashing LEDs and amazing color combinations are pretty popular. This is probably because they are not only simple but one can literally see the results instantly. Let’s have a look at a microcontroller controlled police strobe light using an ATtiny45 from Atmel. LED flashing circuits have been around for ages and probably always … [Read more…]
The most common way to ‘kill’ a Atmel AVR microcontroller is by programming fuse bits wrong. Sooner or later every Atmel AVR enthusiast will stumble across a fuse-bit related problem. The most common mistake, a wrong clock source selection through the CKSEL fuse-bit, can be fixed easily. The fuse-bits CKSEL0 through CKSEL3 let the microcontroller … [Read more…]
A low-noise block downconverter (LNB) is a key element in a satellite receiver system and is responsible for converting the relatively high frequency of the received signal into the more convenient L-Band. But how do they work and what do they look like on the inside? Let’s have a look! From a theoretical standpoint, a … [Read more…]
More and more computers (especially laptops) aren’t equipped with serial and / or parallel ports anymore. Therefore, more and more programming interfaces utilize USB instead. However, some people are extremely attached to their older serial / parallel programmers and often oversee how a USB based device can simplify their life a lot. Atmels’s AVRISP mkII … [Read more…]
An Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator (OCXO) is used wherever one needs a highly accurate and precise frequency reference. Abracon manufactures a series of affordable off-the-shelf OCXOs, which are due to their low price and outstanding performance particularly suitable for homebrew designs. Abracon’s AOCJY1 series offers various through-hole OCXOs with several possible frequencies between 10 MHz … [Read more…]
Little spy bugs and tracking devices are generally very popular circuits in the electronics community. This is probably because the user gets to feel like James Bond and other special agents for a while. Let’s have a look at a simple tracking device. Spy bugs and tracking devices are not only very popular in the … [Read more…]