Spice Up Your PC
July 2002
It just isn't always practical to build a circuit just to experiment with it. Luckily, with a PC, you can simulate nearly any circuit you can imagine with better results than you might expect.
A TRULY SOLDERLESS BREADBOARD - PART 2
May 2004
Last month, I showed you how easy it is to build logic circuits using a Xilinx CPLD (Complex Programmable Logic Device). This month, we'll dig into a more sophisticated design. In particular, I'll show you how to build a useful piece of test equipment — a "logic scope." This is a poor man's logic analyzer. The logic scope reads four bits of digital data, records them, and then displays the waveforms on a normal oscilloscope.
Remote Temp Logger
November 2004
Recently, I needed to acquire some temperature data from multiple remote locations and decided to avail myself of the phone system. For the data acquisition unit, I decided to use an Atmel ATmega 8. This processor has plenty of horsepower for the task and a high performance A/D converter.
Relocation Assistance
October 2005
If you program PICs in assembly language, it is a good bet you use MPASM — Microchip’s free assembler/editor/simulator. It’s also a good bit that you write one big file that maps out the program in the PIC’s memory.
DSP for the PC
December 2006
Digital Signal Processing (DSP) has revolutionized how we design and build filters, signal generators, and other audio circuitry. Usually when you think of DSP, you think of specialized processors from companies like Analog Devices, Motorola, or Texas Instruments. However, practically every modern PC has a sound card that allows it to function as an audio DSP. With the speed of modern processors, a PC is up to nearly any audio task where you’d use a traditional DSP chip.” ...
