DS1307 RTC Emulator – The Arduino library

Things must come to an end. I decided to make a new library experiment, putting an ending mark to the DS1307 Real Time Clock hacking project, because the project was born as an encapsulation of a real RTC in a PIC microcontroller, wrapping an RTC hardware engine to emulate the DS1307; then a subsequent development on …

HardWire, the enhanced Arduino Wire library

I have spent a lot of time on playing and later working on the I2C buses. I almost always used self developed libraries, both for learning and job requirement purposes. Then, when experimenting with a portability of a project in the Arduino environment, I started to trying the official Wire library, discovering some incompatibilities for my …

Lino Project

I am playing with LEDs for few month and during that time some little projects were born, but now I need a system to handle the logical part and the power distribution. I simply just can't use an Arduino board, or any other development board: I need a proper power handling embedded in a small space, …

Tiny, robust, low cost, fail-safe LED driver: the Glighter-S project

It has been a while since the last LED related article. Was experimented the linear current source, its pros and cons and the field of application. Now arises the need of a small version, handling the same high power, things that are contrapposed in the linear regulator. I need something that I can bring with …

DS1307 RTC Emulator: triple library, one hack

I have already tried once in this article. An emulation of DS1307 chip, to hack in some way other devices, tricking them to talk with the DS1307 chip. I've tried to see if was meaningful to emulate a well-known RTC protocol in an MCU instead using the additional dedicated DS1307 RTC chip. What I have …

Current sources for LEDs – Glighter: a multichannel LED Driver

A power constant current source, high speed, for power LEDs. Taken all the errors made previously, I tried a new linear based current source which should be kept "simple" and "fast".

Current sources for LEDs: firsts DIY impressions

Recently I found that today almost lighbulbs are made with power LEDs. And surprisingly most of them are made so cheap that the controller fails far away before its lifetime. At least for what I've experienced with few models. Most of them seems to work well, and I think that LEDs are the future for …

Smoked crystals (Oscillator)

Once upon a time, during a lecture about electronics, more specifically on crystal quartz oscillators, a professor said that you can break a crystal oscillator by dropping it, because the quartz inside can be broken due to the fall, even if it seems solid like a common 1/4W resistor. Let me start with a briefing …

NTC Measurements

When dealing with low-cost, home made termometers, the choice often fall on the NTCs. These sensors are resistors which are varying their resistance in function of the temperature, with a negative trend: Negative Temperature Coefficient is their name, also known as Thermistor. That means higher the temperature, lower the resistance: We observe that this cheap …

PWM and I2C libraries

I needed a flexible square waveform generator to test the behavior of a mosfet. I have in my hand a board with a PIC18 microcontroller (http://sangon.it/), so I wrote few lines of code for it. Of course, things are degenerated and I have been infected by the developer fever and is born the desire of …