Learning electronics: Release the Magic Blue Smoke

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Hobbies, Crafts, & Houses > Learning electronics: Release the Magic Blue Smoke

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Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

I made a little solar tracker as a group project, thought some of you guys might be interested:

Click here for the full 1280x960 image.

Click here for the full 1280x960 image.

Main thread in the Cavern of Cobol (I mostly worked on the microcontroller) http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3240768

# ¿ Dec 20, 2009 12:52

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 22:02

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Metajo Cum Dumpster posted:

Don't forget, Jan 7 9am-11pm mst Sparkfun is giving everyone $100 credit towards anything on the store.

Not everyone, the first thousand people (first $100k of merch max $100/person whatever)

The site has 94,000 members, of which an unknown percentage are active

# ¿ Jan 2, 2010 22:15

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

babyeatingpsychopath posted:

What kind of signal is a "hall effect throttle" sending?

If it uses a hall effect sensor like the one sparkfun has in stock this may be helpful
http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Components/General/Hall-US1881EUA.pdf

# ¿ Jan 4, 2010 01:28

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

#cobol's denizens had a 0% success rate between us

I got to the checkout page, was told I qualified for the $100 off, and clicked the submit button on three different occasions (with many failed attempts to load the page between em) and none of them went through. A few other #coballers had similar poo poo happen

The #sparkfun and #sparkfun-discuss channels on freenode were full of similar poo poo

Oh well V :shobon:

# ¿ Jan 7, 2010 19:00

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Delta-Wye posted:

Fatwallet is a bunch of fucktards who live to ruin good things for everyone, but it wasn't all them. The IRC channel had 2000 people in it this morning - even just the SFE customers were enough to piss in our cheerios.

The vast majority of these didn't get poo poo, some were vocal about it

I'd be really surprised if more than 30% of the giveaway went to prior Sparkfun customers (none of the stuff in my cart had noticeably gone down in stock when I checked before emptying it)

Besides the fatwallet fuckery, there will probably be a bunch of new posters on arduino.cc's forum in the next month or so, followed by a bunch of Duemilanove boards collecting dust

# ¿ Jan 7, 2010 19:34

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Liquidware is a lil cheaper if you just want an arduino iirc

# ¿ Jan 7, 2010 20:30

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

avr-gcc and avrdude; arduino.cc provides a makefile if you still want to use arduino libraries but it's way out of date and doesn't work with the current distribution of said libs so you're better off just making your own for whatever libraries you may want to use

Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Jan 9, 2010

# ¿ Jan 9, 2010 05:59

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

ANIME AKBAR posted:

often in amplifier design, fixing stability issues really is as simple as adding capacitance somewhere, so it's not surprising that touching some point fixed it. for reference, the human body is generally has about 25-100pF of capacitance, so try adding values in that neighborhood.

Is that number for a finger press or anywhere? (The only capacitors I've ever done any math on were parallel plate, where geometry would be a major determinant of capacitance)

# ¿ Jan 24, 2010 04:48

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

You can test function with an incandescent [flash]light pretty easily, the solar panels I used on my solar tracker got almost zilch from fluorescent light though, ymmv

# ¿ Jan 26, 2010 22:58

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Delta-Wye posted:

We have four employees doing "project management" in one form or another (for an systems team of 5 and a software team of 4) and honestly I don't know what they do either

They probably don't know themselves

# ¿ Feb 9, 2010 21:03

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

When society collapses we'll be the wizards of oz irl though :2bong:

# ¿ Feb 9, 2010 21:28

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Naw i have hella guns and i'll use my skills to make autonomous turrets so they can't get me

# ¿ Feb 9, 2010 22:03

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

I dunno about tutorials, just the stuff in Wakerly seems to be enough for the vhdl I've done

# ¿ Feb 9, 2010 23:35

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Recent Arduinos come at 16 MHz from the factory

# ¿ Feb 11, 2010 23:08

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

He's probably getting thrown off by things like the Arduino serial library, which uses member pointers to functions to simulate methods and also uses java's naming conventions to trick people into thinking they're using Java (or maybe C++ circa 1994 as written by an OOD jackass).

# ¿ Feb 22, 2010 04:38

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Delta-Wye posted:

As if Battlemaster's problem with his example was it used an Arduino, and not that it was stupid simple and not really much of a hack. If Arduino's are so easy to use, why aren't the projects people are building even more involved?

(foolishly)Taking a moment to answer a rhetorical question earnestly, I would guess that the problem is that people buy the board and some components with a head full of vague ideas, bang through some examples and one of their simpler ideas, then hit a brick wall. Sometimes the wall is that they want to move on to a much more complex project and balk at the learning curve for a moment, sometimes it's that they can't scrounge components they need nor afford to buy them, sometimes they had rather less immediate ideas for physical computing and embedded systems than they thought, sometimes it's general enthusiasm dropoff that kicks in a week after getting a new gadget, or whatever.

The result is that they have this cool thing that could be a gateway to a ton more even cooler things that instead winds up collecting dust, another project that they really mean to get around to right after they fix the squeak of the garage door and patch the roof on their shed. The videos of simon says or tic-tac-to thrown together with an arduino board are a testament to the early trivial enthusiasm phase of this, along with Hack a Day's meh editors.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2010 08:41

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Hillridge posted:

Is Sparkfun the best place for Arduino related projects, or is there a better place to buy them?

We've started fleshing out the micro-controller class I'll be teaching this fall, and the owner of the center is leaning toward using some sort of Arduino setup. I've never used this particular micro, so I need one to play around with.

I know there has been tons of Arduino discussion in this thread, but I don't want to try and sift through all the previous pages.

If you just want the arduino board, Liquidware may be cheaper. If you want the board plus a bunch of crap, Sparkfun will be fine.

# ¿ Apr 5, 2010 22:19

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Frobbe posted:

found this microcontroller board in the dump pile as well.

now, it is fitted with a Atmel AT89C4051 but the board is labeled Atmel AT89C2051, though i guess that doesnt make much of a difference, gonna investigate data sheets after im done with this exam project. to my eye the circuit and such looks to be simply the supporting electronics for the chip itself, with pins at the bottom for bread boarding, is it possible to rig something that can flash the chip using just a breadboard or do i need a dedicated burner? i already have the Keil programming environment.

gently caress the poo poo out of the keil compiler/linker/entire toolchain

# ¿ May 6, 2010 21:22

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

I'm just saying, in 2010, it chokes on spaces in filenames

When I was using 8051s it was more productive to run a buggy Perl script on Keil headers to make them work with SDCC than to use the Keil toolchain

# ¿ May 6, 2010 22:26

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Slanderer posted:

God bless you, analog IC designers. God loving bless you.

loving wisdom

# ¿ Mar 8, 2011 21:30

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Corla Plankun posted:

What's the story behind the pic in your av

# ¿ Apr 10, 2011 04:02

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Anyone hosed around with the LeafLabs Maple? Considering picking one up in the near future (taking circuits now over the first half of the summer, taking signals & systems over the second half, will be nice to finally have an understanding of how the analog side of the house works beyond v=ir so I figured it might be a good time to step up to a decent uc for prototyping

# ¿ Jun 13, 2011 02:17

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

movax posted:

Pretty beefy, would this be your first uC? A $4.30 LaunchPad would serve equally as well to learn the art and proper usage of C for embedded environments, not to mention giving you experience with a uC family that's ridiculously easy to breadboard and prototype, since you can get it in DIPs.

I've taken an embedded control class that used 8051s and I've used an Arduino for a semester project (solar tracker, read voltages from solar panels and drove a servo and a stepper motor) and for personal fuckaround stuff (kegerator display), so I'm pretty confident with the C and assembly side of things

e: I guess part of the reason a convenient ARM package interests me besides the nice bump in power is that my arch class last semester got me Pretty Enthused with mips asm and its simple pipelined datapath and convenient instruction set, which ARM is relatively similar to afaict?

Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Jun 13, 2011

# ¿ Jun 13, 2011 18:31

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

loving Richards controllers, how do they work!

# ¿ Oct 28, 2011 07:09

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

I'm trying to design a power-up reset for a state machine, and I'm having a fair bit of trouble. I essentially want a ~500 usec single pulse when power is first applied to the circuit to assert clear on the counter that is used to keep track of states. I've tried building this PUR with a 555 timer in monostable mode, but I'm getting wonky results; my assumption is that there are problems with the rising edge of power going into the circuit and the trigger signal being coincident. Is there a simple way to do what I want here?

N/m, I got this working with a Schmitt trigger.

Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Oct 31, 2011

# ¿ Oct 31, 2011 19:52

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Are there any regular cheap hotplates that are especially suitable for soldering?

# ¿ Apr 27, 2012 10:04

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

sixide posted:

No, you won't see anywhere near that kind of loss at audio frequency. Contact resistance will make up the entirety of loss. Hell, I've never even seen a cheapo microwave adapter with that kind of loss.

It's in the ballpark for 2.4ghz stuff :shobon:

# ¿ May 14, 2012 20:53

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Has anyone else here taken advantage of the ST Microelectronics free STM32 F0 (ARM Cortex M0 based uC) eval board? I got mine during finals week and haven't poked anything with it yet in the chaos of graduation and moving, but I'm thinking an OBD-II sniffer.

Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 19:46 on May 29, 2012

# ¿ May 29, 2012 19:43

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Dielectric posted:

An STM32-based OBD2 scanner would probably be a worthwhile effort, if you really want to learn OBD2.

I was thinking of doing this but gently caress it for now I'll just throw together an instantaneous MPG sensor thing with the stn1110. It's moderately lame that cars don't (generally) report instantaneous fuel usage btw.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2012 22:59

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

peepsalot posted:

A lot of newer cars do exactly that. I've heard it's more common on trucks. Some of the newer nissans including my 2011 370Z reports fuel consumption, instantaneous, trip average, estimated miles till empty, etc.

Really? From what I had read you generally had to estimate instantaneous fuel use from instantaneous mass air flow (with the assumption that the engine is always running under the stoichiometrically optimal 14.7:1 ratio). If the new stuff just reports it that makes poo poo real simple.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2012 04:32

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

peepsalot posted:

Also vehicles won't be targeting 14.7 AFR all the time, only really at light cruise and lower RPMs. At wide open throttle it's closer to 12, and on decel it's infinity/undefined(injectors off).

Yep, the 14.7 assumption is a bad one. Also, if you're coasting in gear long enough a lot of newer cars will stop injecting, but the MAF reading won't zero.

peepsalot posted:

A better estimate would be based on injector pulse width * cylinders * injector flow rate, which I'm pretty sure is how the factory computer calculates it.

Unfortunately injector pulse width isn't exactly universally reported via the OBD-II interface and I CBA to wire something to measure it myself

Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Jun 8, 2012

# ¿ Jun 8, 2012 03:37

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

bobua posted:

Can you explain more indepth on the series resistance?

You'd be using some capacitance to balance out the line inductance, and in doing so you create an LC circuit, which by nature is going to oscillate at its resonant frequency. By adding a resistor in series with the power rail you damp the oscillation (the Q or quality factor to which he referred is the inverse of the damping ratio zeta) and prevent it from loving with your circuit.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2012 04:00

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

longview posted:

PIC stuff

Nb. that if you use Microchip's compiler instead of the Hi-Tech one a lot more of the register names match. It also doesn't try to hide the fact that you really only have one ISR the way Hi-Tech does, and iirc has some handy bit manipulation helper things.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 13:12

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Current electronics status: meeting with the analog guy from Cypress in about an hour to see if we can get ENOB > 17 bits from the ADC on our PSOC 5 project without disabling Every Freaking Thing

PS movax what is your av from? I've always wondered.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 16:52

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

movax posted:

Pulp as gently caress (1958) but awesome.

This is frequently the case; eg. Poul Anderson's Flandry stuff from the mid-late 50s was awesome in a very fun way, and probably peaked in the mid-60s when he had an optimal mix of pulp and (rather) hard sci-fi in the stories in that series.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 17:04

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Otto Skorzeny posted:

Current electronics status: meeting with the analog guy from Cypress in about an hour to see if we can get ENOB > 17 bits from the ADC on our PSOC 5 project without disabling Every Freaking Thing

Btw as per this meeting, the answer to high precision analog problems with the PSoC 5 is "use a PSoC 3 instead because the PSoC 5 isn't actually a mature product; the SP1 for the PSoC 5 which actually works is in tape out and will be available Real Soon Now(tm)" :argh:

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 20:24

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Create a virtual bathroom system mapping n logical toilets to your two physical toilets.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2012 13:18

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

I'm testing a high-precision ADC and I want to generate a very, very stable voltage around .5 - 1.0 volts to test it with. What's my best bet? An EDC voltage standard unfortunately have about 40 uvolt of ripple near 1v

Blotto Skorzany fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Jun 29, 2012

# ¿ Jun 29, 2012 00:13

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

Slanderer posted:

You're gonna have to give me more than that. What are your requirements for accuracy, and noise? Is it just being used as a buffered reference?

EDIT: Just after looking real quick, I don't see any references that go that low. Probably some solid state physics semiconductor super mathematical bullshit, y'know?

Accuracy doesn't have to be that great, I just want something real, real stable - 4 uvolts RMS of ripple would be good, 1 would be ideal. I'm using this as a reference to see if a vendor is full of poo poo (or perhaps more accurately how full of poo poo they are) in their claim that their 20-bit sigma delta ADC is capable of an ENOB of 19.2 bits at 10 updates/second. Really I only want 17 bits and could live with about 16.3, but right now I'm seeing 18 bits near zero and 14.1 bits near full scale (1.024v), degrading just about linearly through the range, even after applying all sorts of filtering and massaging. I suspect that the ADC's internal VREF is the problem, but before addressing that I want to eliminate the signal that I'm feeding the thing as a source of the poor precision.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2012 01:06

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 22:02

Blotto Skorzany: Nov 7, 2008; He's a PSoC, loose and runnin'
came the whisper from each lip
And he's here to do some business with
the bad ADC on his chip
bad ADC on his chiiiiip

I've got a couple of 34401A's that I'm currently using to measure the output of the EDC CR103 that I'm currently using as my voltage source. Do you think that'll do?

# ¿ Jun 29, 2012 01:40

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Hobbies, Crafts, & Houses > Learning electronics: Release the Magic Blue Smoke

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