Steve's Things

Since my last update I’ve been busily collecting Arduinos and various other things. This is getting sort of expensive. Anyways, first off.

Digi-Gage

My Digi-Gage is coming along quite nicely. I spun a set of boards from Itead studio a couple of weeks ago, paid a bit extra for the ENIG and the black soldermask. very nice indeed.

This board is for my digital gage. The board interfaces a PIC18F4685 to a LS7166 and thus counts ticks from a run of the mill glass scale. Hopefully it’ll work as well as I hope.

This is it semi-populated. turns out I forgot to buy the TQFP package MCU hence why the mcu isn’t present on the board. I’ll get the rest of the parts from Digikey soon.

Arduino – devboard collection

Well, I’ve been spending money on all kinds of things and perhaps it’s time to slow down a bit. Especially considering that I don’t use them. Here’s what I’ve got and some thoughts about them.

• Arduino Uno – The standard arduino, handy, very handy
• Arduino Mega 2560 – A bigger version of the standard. Good for extra pinouts.
• Arduino Nano – Extremely handy, combining both the arduino usefulness with a breadboardable stick.
• Chipkit Uno – A (much) faster 32 bit arduino. Only disadvantage is the 3.3 volt limit on IO. That said, it has double the IO of a standard arduino and uses the Arduino IDE
• Chipkit Max – A larger version of the previous one with many more IO.
• AVR Butterfly – Haven’t really played with it yet but it seems pretty promising for something cute and interesting.
• Netduino Plus – Like an arduino but faster and able to be programmed in visual c#. I haven’t figured out how to program it in VB yet, perhaps it’s not even possible.
• Netduino Mini – like the above but with a smaller form. Neat little device.
• Duinomite Mini – another cool device with VGA out just like the Duinomite standard.
• Beaglebone – Still haven’t used this much yet
• Olimexino 328 – An arduino but built well. Great for industrial use. Gotta love olimex.