Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller and analog semiconductors, today announced three development kits  that enable the rapid design of accessories for iPod and iPhone using Microchip’s vast portfolio of PIC® microcontrollers. The kits provide examples of the hardware and software required to implement applications, such as digital-audio sound systems, docking stations and [...]

An indicator is nice, but how to implement that? Because all the intelligence of the heat regulation happens inside the soldering iron, the station itself is just a big 230->24V-transformer and an on/off-switch. Running an extra wire to the soldering iron to sniff out its status wasn’t an option. There is another way to get [...]

New mikroC PRO for dsPIC30/33 and PIC24 v3.00 BETA released! mikroElektronika have  release a new BETA version of mikroC PRO for dsPIC30/33 and PIC24 compiler with a lot of useful upgrades. Compiler is now producing smaller and faster code with SSA optimization. Make your comments alive with new feature called Active Comments. New and improved [...]

Most old PDAs use CCFLs as backlights. While such a PDA itself can still be quite useful, the backlight sometimes is old or damaged. You can, however, replace it with a more modern and power-friendly solution: white leds. To do that in a power-efficient way, a bit more is needed, though. Source: spritesmods

sPlan is a software with already many thousands enthusiastic users. You need a software to design your schematic circuit diagrams easy and fast? You won’t get pass sPlan! No matter if you only want to sketch a little circuit diagram or if you need to design a big project with several pages. Download: sPlan 7.0

Keep your laptop and cell phone’s power plugs from falling off the back of your desk using a simple binder clip, no modification required. A very easy and inexpensive solution to a few binder clips. Binder clips are for sale in a commercial office or maybe you even have office located somewhere. The binder clips [...]

The high speed scanner in the video above easily allows the user to digitize books using a flip-book style scanning process which can process 200 pages per minute. The camera prototype rig captures 500 frames per second at 1280×1024 pixels. The trick is in the two optical capturing modes of each frame. See Video.. Source: [...]

Adam Mayer of NYC Resistor is working on  script for processing small pixel fonts for use in 8-bit AVR applications. The 8-bit AVRs have very little memory, so he stored each 7-pixel-high column as a single byte.  The pixel data, along with the table that maps ASCII codes to character data, comes in at around [...]

This GTO is controlled entirely via iPod Touch, allowing the owner to start the car, open the doors and trunk, roll down the windows, control the radio, arm the car alarm and even rev the engine – all from across the parking lot.Range is limited since communication is handled via bluetooth but we’ve seen a [...]

In this article Mr.Simon will show how to breadboard a simple USB generic HID device, creating the PIC18F firmware and finally creating the Windows interface for the device which will allow you to control a LED from the PC and read the state of a push-button from the device. Since the advent of Windows 7 [...]

This clock will work extremely accurate as a real time clock & also it will give you an alarm notification on every hour. This clock uses 12 hour clock format. Features: High Accurate Timing, AM/PM Indicator, Hourly Chime, Key Press Tone, Power Sense / Display Off and Battery Backup. Source: gsmicro