Blog
This is a private homepage... ;)
Yenka! A very nice circuit simulation software
Rafael found an application called Yenka in the web. This software is wonderful! You could use it for simulating many things. We are using it for designing and simulating electronic circuits but other stuff like mathematics and physics are available too. It is a very nice application for teaching and learning...
Below is an image of a simple transistor switch designed with Yenka.
Switched off:
Switched on:
You could simulate the circuit. When switching the button in the lower left corner. You could measure the Voltage and Ampere at every point of the circuit... ;) Now I don't need so much time to solder anymore... even it is a lot of fun soldering own devices.
You could download it for free and use it completely for free when using it at home! With all features!!! There is a version for Mac, Windows AND Linux available.
Make: Electronics
I got this great book yesterday: "Make: Electronics". It was exactly what I needed. It describes in a very hackish way how electronics works...
I got the german translation and read a lot in it within the first day. It has many examples of analog circuits for building funny and useful stuff by yourself. DIY!
Thank you very much for this book! I love it!
May the Force be with You
I found this in the ./images directory of hanez.org today and thought it must be online again... ;)
Arduino TA07-11 5x7 Dot Matrix Display
I built a new Arduino based device this weekend. I was ill and had much time chilling at home and hacked this:
It is a TA01-11 LED matrix from Kingbright. It was a little bit tricky to figure out how it works because it was the first matrix I played with but at the end everything worked fine... ;) Thanks to Rafael for this great hacking session!
In this Example I am using a Kingbright TA07-11 Dot Matrix LED Display using an Arduino as controller.
The code is mostly based on the DirectDriveLEDMatrix example on the Arduino playground website.
The next step will be to use a LED driver IC for keeping the usage of Arduino ouputs low.
The five Transistors are for regulating the voltage on the columns of the Display. In this circuit all LED's are getting the same voltage power of 5V.
The code looks very ugly at the moment, but I will clean it up. It is a dirty written prototype... ;)
WTH? My Netduino just arrived
I got my new toy some minutes ago. A Netduino!
Netduino is an open source electronics platform using the .NET Micro Framework. The idea is taken from the Arduino platform but the difference is, that the Netduino is being programmed in .NET and it has a much more powerful 32-bit microcontroller onboard. It is an AT91SAM7X512 with the following specs:
- Atmel 32-bit microcontroller
- Speed: 48MHz, ARM7
- Code Storage: 128 KB
- RAM: 60 KB
Hopefully I could develop with the Mono project for it but at first I will do my work in a Microsoft based environment. Sounds contradictory? Yes, it is... but I want to give it a try... ;)
I am a little bit it ill at the moment but it will be a funny weekend when playing with this nice piece of hardware.