Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Explorations in things electronic
EtherProg from Jason/NT7S assembled. Didn’t take too long. I think I’m getting better at this. I’ve also figured out how to keep the tip of my soldering iron clean, which, as it turns out, really makes soldering a whole lot easier.
Now to figure out what to do with it.
I need to find conical tips for my soldering iron or else get another one with easier to find tips. The new tips I ordered for my Radio Shack soldering iron are all chisel tip, which will probably be too big for SMT work.
I happened to stumble upon a MiniLab II electronics lab that Jason/NT7S was selling. Seems to be an older version of this Mini-Lab 200 and reminds me of the old Radio Shack electronics lab kits that I used to see in their stores when I was a kid.
Along with the Mini-Lab, he was nice enough to send along a bunch of other goodies: capacitors, variable capacitors, potentiometers, diodes, transistors, 555 timer chips, ATtiny85 microcontrollers, oscillators, inductors, connectors and some copper clad boards. More things than I know what to do with, but I’m sure I’ll learn and find something to put them to use in.
My parts bin has fewer empty boxes now. I may need another one. I definitely need more workbench space.
The SoftRock SDR radio kits I ordered arrived in a little box yesterday. The SoftRock Lite II receiver and the SoftRock Ensemble RXTX kits I got both contain a lot of bits and pieces to put onto relatively small boards.
The SoftRock Lite II kit.
The SoftRock RXTX kit.
It will be a little while before I’m ready to tackle either of them. The receiver kit looks like it will be the easiest to start with. There are a few SMT components to put on, but not as many as the RXTX kit.
I received a new kit from Jason/@NT7S in the mail yesterday.
It’s a small little kit called EtherProg. Documentation is somewhat sparse, consisting of a circuit schematic, bill of materials and some source code.
I’m not entirely sure what it does yet, but there’s an ATtiny85 microcontroller in the middle of it. That and the source code tells me it’s something programmable or a programming interface for other projects.
Sure, I could ask, but I think it will be more fun to put it together and try to figure it out for myself.
Then I’ll ask.
Spent a couple hours putting together the two breadboard power supply kits while I was waiting for laundry to get done.
Soldered all the pieces into place and worked on refining my technique. I think I’m starting to get better at it now. Still looks a little messy, but it’s not quite as blobby as when I first started. Managed to not burn myself either.
Grabbed a USB A/B cable off the scanner (closest one available), plugged the B side into the power supply and…nothing.
Crap, I did something wrong putting it together.
Then I realized the other end wasn’t plugged into anything. Plugged the A side into the computer and I was rewarded with an LED light coming on!
The USB power supply works perfectly. Measured pretty close to the 5 and 3.3 V it’s supposed to put out. I need to find a suitable wall wart for the other one. The closest handy one I had (used for the cradle for my Tungsten T3) only puts out 5V/1A. It gave me just under 3V, but didn’t change when I switched to 5V. Think I’ve got a few more wall warts around that will put out the 6-12 V the power supply wants. Just need to hunt them down.
Now to find some projects to make use of them.
More soldering XPs!