Everything for Electronics
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Select Powerpole Ports by Touch

This idea got its start after reading the article by Matt Newman VA3MGN in the January 2023 issue of QST, “Switch Selection of Powerpole Ports.” Combining his concept with the use of a Nextion touch display seemed like a nice upgrade.

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Build a Simple Toaster Oven Temperature Profile Controller

Building a toaster oven temperature profile controller might not sound so exciting, but that's just the first layer of the onion! The exact same hardware and software can be used to build all sorts of embedded microcontroller projects, and you can do so without ever installing a software development environment anywhere because it's all inside the microcontroller itself. This is all based on relatively new technology called "WebUSB" and "Web Serial."

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The 555 for Today’s Projects

In 1970, Signetics engineer Hans Camenzind designed the 555 programmable timer chip. Fifty-three years later, it’s still going strong as the world’s largest selling integrated circuit. I’ll explain the inner workings of the 555 and help make you an expert on creating your own 555-based designs.

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Adding an Audible Circuit Alarm

The most often used trouble indicator in a circuit is the ubiquitous LED. Unfortunately, we don’t always have eyes on our equipment to see when problems arise.  Here’s a simple way to add an audio trouble alarm to circuits that only have a visual indicator.

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Build a General-Purpose Raspberry Pi Data Logger Hat

This article describes the process of designing and building a custom Raspberry Pi HAT circuit board. This HAT works with a Python script to record and live plot battery voltage, temperature, and capacity. The ability to log data over an extended period is an included useful feature.

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Take the Z80 Challenge

This project started out as a challenge to myself: Could I cram a full-featured Z80 microcomputer using DIP packages onto an ExpressPCB MiniBoard (3.8” by 2.5”)? Here’s what happened.

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Updating a General-purpose Programming System

Twenty years ago, I published an article in Nuts & Volts about designing a general-purpose programming system: the LP120. I’ve used the LP120 heavily for the last 20 years to support my eight-bit design hobby. It now has uploadable drivers and programming modules for many eight-bit micros, EPROMs, and GALs. However, things have changed since 2000. Back then, few microcontrollers had more than 4K bytes of program memory. Now, eight-bit PICs have up to 64K words of memory. Clearly an update to the LP120 was called for.

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