Posted on November 11th, 2006  I needed a device to test R/C servos. Hooking up receiver, battery, servos and then running the transmitter with the antenna extended inside the house was awkward. I thought this could be a nice little project for some microcontroller. After a long abstinence from PIC assembler, I downloaded the latest MPLAB release and programmed away. Here it is, the first cut of my servo tester.
Read more … »
Posted on October 28th, 2006  During the summer of 1998 I built yet another PIC based clock. I had an old LED analog clock kicking around. It was a CMOS logic design built from an ELV (a German electronics magazine) kit. The clock lost its time every single time there was the slightest brownout, it bothered me to no end. So I set out to reuse some of the parts and built a PIC based replacment. The most significant item on the feature list was a low power time keeping mode to keep the time ticking but the display dark during AC power loss. What can I say, it actually worked! The clock was able to keep time for several minutes running on just a larger capacitor (where the schematic says ‘battery’).
Read more … »
Posted on October 5th, 2006 Curious me wanted to know the pinout of the plug on the back of my Hitec radios. Some time ago I made up a buddy cord for the Hitec Optic 6 and Hitec Laser 4. It took me a while to retrace those steps and find all the information used to make that cable. So here it is, this is how I made my Hitec buddy cord.
Read more … »
Posted on October 4th, 2006  During spring and summer of 1998 I developed my second project utilizing a Microchip PIC processor. The primary purpose was to explore character LCD displays and 2-wire bus (I2C) devices with a Microchip PIC microcontroller. The project was a digital room thermostat with multiple setpoints at different times of the day.
Read more … »
Posted on October 3rd, 2006  It was February of 1998 when I first put my eye on the Microchip PIC microcontroller product line. It all started many years earlier with a Commodore C-64, followed by homebrew 6502 hardware projects and a fair bit of assembler programming on the 6502. Maybe some day I will find those notes if they still exist. After the 6502 adventures came a 8051 based project. In those days flash memory or EEPROM were unheard of. The project called for a single chip embedded processor. Philips made it, but only with masked ROM. For development, an 8051 with piggyback EPROM was available. Yes, the cermaic body of the 8051 actually had gold pins for an EPROM on its back! Unfortunately that chip was prohibitively expensive (for a student budget) and the project never materialized beyond hardware concept and some initial coding.
Read more … »
Posted on April 24th, 2006 For a long time we omitted this cache from our trips. It sounded like a difficult challenge, rightfully so. We’ve agreed to turn around and post a DNF if the cache proved to difficult or to dangerous for children. With that in mind we packed up and went for a trip with the single purpose of finding Lose Lake #2.
Read more … »
Posted on April 18th, 2006 The first few caches we placed have been out there for a few years. The last log entries indicated some trouble. The rubbermaid containers were showing wear and tear. They are also not all that waterproof. We decided to make a trip with the primary purpose of maintaining the older caches.
Read more … »
Posted on April 17th, 2006 Ok, this is not really GeoCaching but very much GPS related. The Degree Confluence Project is all about intersections of latitude and longitude lines across the globe. Here is the story of some Sioux Lookout folks that went out to document the 50°N 92°W confluence.
Posted on April 16th, 2006 It is getting warmer, the snow is quickly disappearing. In fact, there is hardly any snow left. This Easter weekend was blessed with some outstanding warm weather. Great weather for yard work, ya right. Let’s go caching!
Read more … »
Posted on March 18th, 2006 Another bright sunny Saturday that just begged for some outdoor activity, like Geocaching. We ended up driving Highway 105 towards Ear Falls to look for Cliff Lake and Franks’ Cache.
Read more … »
|
|
I needed a device to test R/C servos. Hooking up receiver, battery, servos and then running the transmitter with the antenna extended inside the house was awkward. I thought this could be a nice little project for some microcontroller. After a long abstinence from PIC assembler, I downloaded the latest MPLAB release and programmed away. Here it is, the first cut of my servo tester.
