.:madworm:.'s photos with the keyword: kicad

The fully vectorized logo + a perl script to easily resize it can be found here .

These will show up on tindie in a couple of weeks from now.

Having a full reel of 1k resistors makes you want to use them. Sometimes this makes you blind to the obvious. Soldering 2 larger parts vs. 8 quite small ones is so much nicer and more time efficient.

No more chip frying... assuming I don't reverse the supply voltage ;-) I had to sacrifice some of the axial symmetry. Oh well...

Postscript printing is not encouraged, use 'plot' instead. Build: (2011-07-08)-stable, running on linux.

I have a couple of PT4115 LED drivers in the mail. This adapter will allow me to prototype on breadboard / perfboard without too much trouble as far as soldering is concerned.

I have a couple of PT4115 LED drivers in the mail. This adapter will allow me to prototype on breadboard / perfboard without too much trouble as far as soldering is concerned.

Minimal effort to get started with the Macroblock MBI5030 PWM LED driver. Comes with onboard LEDs, but can still drive external ones. All pins broken out. Only needs a microcontroller and a high-frequency grayscale clock. An AVR running at 16MHz can use its CLOCK-OUT pin for the latter. The chips 'speaks' an SPI-like protocol. Unfortunately some information is encoded in the timing of the LE input, so one cannot use fast hardware SPI for the hole transfer. The special sequences must be bit-banged. Nevertheless it is a rather affordable chip and does mostly what it should. There is an issue with the datasheet(s) that can be found on the web. The older ones document functions that definitely are not implemented in the current silicon.

Too bad I don't have any 0603 LEDs...

Minimal effort to get started with the Macroblock MBI5030 PWM LED driver. Comes with onboard LEDs, but can still drive external ones. All pins broken out. Only needs a microcontroller and a high-frequency grayscale clock. An AVR running at 16MHz can use its CLOCK-OUT pin for the latter. The chips 'speaks' an SPI-like protocol. Unfortunately some information is encoded in the timing of the LE input, so one cannot use fast hardware SPI for the hole transfer. The special sequences must be bit-banged. Nevertheless it is a rather affordable chip and does mostly what it should. There is an issue with the datasheet(s) that can be found on the web. The older ones document functions that definitely are not implemented in the current silicon.

Is it useful? Maybe. I have a couple of existing projects that would benefit from a rotary knob, but not enough code-space is left to add encoder handling. Serial comms is already working, so this is the simpler way to make it work. A little quiz: {1,-1,0,-1,0,0,1,1,0,0,-1,0,-1,1,0}

Is it useful? Maybe. I have a couple of existing projects that would benefit from a rotary knob, but not enough code-space is left to add encoder handling. Serial comms is already working, so this is the simpler way to make it work. A little quiz: {1,-1,0,-1,0,0,1,1,0,0,-1,0,-1,1,0}

I will have to think about debouncing a bit, but in general it works quite nicely. In this picture it controls the lights used to illuminate it. The lights understand serial, so the knob only has to send '+' or '-' to adjust brightness. It also works very nicely as a volume knob for amarok, kmix ... only requires linux, KDE4 ;-) The ATtiny85 is hidden on the other side ;-) As usual you can have all design files and code. Search for "Serial-Knob" and take a look inside the "ATtiny_projects" repo for code: [ 1 ],[ 2 ].