Dangerous Prototypes Bus Pirate Using an forked version of the Open Logic Sniffer (available here) you can setup a Bus Pirate to act a digital logic analyzer.  Not a substitute for a dedicated logic analyzer, but can do the trick if necessary.  Amazingly enough the client runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris. There…

In the last post we looked at testing new I2C devices using the Bus Pirate when prototyping a new design.  In this post we look at making a more permanent implementation by interfacing the MCP4725 Digital-to-Analog Converter to the Raspberry Pi.  Just as last time, we will be driving an LED.  Some notes about our…

Using a Parallax Propeller microcontroller and some assembly language, we can get a nice strobing LED effect.  And now for some code, you can also grab it here.

Vibra-Bot Over the weekend my family attended RobotFest at the National Electronics Museum. It was an awesome event that introduced my daughter to soldering, rockets, and R2-D2. Hopefully this will inspire her to find her inner geek. The highlight for me was watching my daughter solder her first bit of electronics. It was a simple…

I am putting together some slides for a talk on microcontrollers later this year and would like to get feedback from anyone who is knowledgeable in this area to provide feedback, comments, thoughts, suggestions. The talk will use the Arduino platform as an example. I am also trying to teach some basics of electronics, electrical…

So I’ve been reading anything I can get my hands on about the newly invented memristor. You can read more about the history and general concept over here. The basic idea is this, the memristor is the fourth basic circuit element (the resistor, capacitor, and inductor are the other three) that has been speculated to…

I’ve been tinkering with SparkFun’s MCP4725 I2C Digital to Analog converter or DAC. Buy yours here. I have been reading about the I2C or Two-Wire protocol but this is the first time I’ve used it. I did not see a useful tutorial out there for this breakout board (aka BoB) so I decided to throw…