Nathan's Blog

I was asked whether an Arduino would be capable of measuring a device that is rotating at 100,000 RPM. Assuming that there is 1 interrupt per rotation, that gives us the following:

100k\:rpm = \frac{100k}{60} \frac{rotations}{sec}

Therefore, \frac{60}{100k} \frac{sec}{rotation}

So the period is \frac{60}{100k} sec and the frequency = \frac{1}{\frac{...

My Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope arrived today! I know patience is a virtue, but I have a really hard time waiting for packages, so I was very excited when it finally arrived! Here it is, just waiting to be unboxed:http://www.foxytronics.com/uploads/gallery/album_18/gallery_1_18_88377.jpg I excitedly cut open to find... another box! A box within a box -- bri...

The final project in one of my engineering classes this semester is for my lab partner and I to build a circuit to drive a solar garden light. This is our pre-report for the project, which gives a general overview of how we intend to complete the project.

Project specifications:

ENGE 321

ELECTRONICS CIRCUITS...

This board was designed for use as a general prototyping board, as I needed something a little more robust then my previous one. The main reason for building this was that I needed a serial connection to a PC for debugging. It's hard to learn ADC's, Timers, PWM etc....

My first L297-298 stepper motor controller was made on prototyping board, which turned out to be a nightmare for two reasons:
It's really hard to keep track of all the wires and where they're supposed to go when you're trying to assemble the board.
I meticulously cut all the wires to the "right" lengths and bent them at right angles because I wanted the s...

I designed this board to be a general-purpose experimentation board to help me learn about the PIC184550 USB module (or SIE). This was meant to be a kind of "step up" from my dsPIC30f4011 board which uses an RS-232 serial interface for communication with a PC. I really wanted to move from using RS-232 to USB, as USB is the new standard these days...

I finally finished my first SMT PCB, which I’ve been working on for a while. It was designed to be a general purpose board for a PIC18f4550 microcontroller. It has mostly 0805 parts on it, with the microcontroller being a TQFP package.

Schematic:

http://www.foxytroni...ery_1_3_620.png


PCB:

http://www.foxytronics.com/u...