Archive for November 2012

Hacks to Make Life Easier

99 Life Hacks to Make Life Easier page is a great list of images that each give one of 99 life hacks that might just make certain life situations a little easier for all of us. Hopefully those images make this day a little bit better and give you ideas for new hacks.

Arduino Leonardo and Micro

Arduino Leonardo is a pretty new microcontroller board based on the ATmega32u4. It has 20 digital input/output pins (of which 7 can be used as PWM outputs and 12 as analog inputs), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a micro USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed

Netduino

Netduino is an interesting dev board built around the .NET Micro framework with the goal of being compatible with Arduino shields. Netduino is an open source hardware platform that can run .NET Micro Framework 4.2 code. The Netduino is a dev board built around the .NET Micro framework with the goal of being compatible with

How to protect RS-232 serial connections

How to protect RS-232 serial connections article pointed me to a recent white paper from APC-Schneider Electric that explains specific power protection issues related to RS-232 cabling. The Protection of RS-232 Serial Connections document contends that the RS-232 port often represents the “Achilles heel” of computer installations which are otherwise well protected by UPS systems

3D printing is hot

3D Printing Flies High now. Articles on three-dimensional printers are popping up everywhere these days. And nowadays there are many 3D printer products. Some are small enough to fit in a briefcase and others are large enough to print houses. Everything you ever wanted to know about 3D printing article tells that 3D printing is

H-Bridge Motor Driver Module

H-bridge circuit is a very useful in electrical motor controlling. You can drive a DC motor easily at both directions with H-bridge, and if you add some PWM to driver circuit you can even control the motor speed on both directions. There are very many simple H-bridge circuit designs in Internet. Nowadays there are many

Very minimal Arduino-compatible circuit

I saw some days ago a pointer to The ultimate low-cost dev board. Or at least looks pretty close to it. The shrimp is a very, very minimal Arduino-compatible circuit meant to control all the pins on an ATMega328. The components only cost about £1.40 ($2.25 USD) when bought in volume, making it perfect for

Visualizing 100,000 Stars In Chrome

Google has rolled out a new web experiment for Chrome. 100,000 Stars: Google’s latest Chrome experiment taps NASA to visually explore the Milky Way. This one is a visualization of the locations of over 100,000 nearby stars (pulls data from astrometric databases and catalogs). Using Chrome’s WebGL, CSS3D, and Web Audio support, you can zoom