Projects

Nixie Tube Ornament schematic

Nixie Tube Ornament

The Nixie Tube Ornament is a homage to the light-up&motion ornaments from the early 90’s. The ornament looks cool on a tree and makes a great gift. Finally, a use for IN-12/15 top view tubes! I used an IN-15A symbol nixie in this ornament. An IN-12 works great too. A video of the ornament alone:

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MikroElektronika’s “Ready for PIC” board talks to “Processing”1

MikroElektronika’s “Ready for PIC” board talks to “Processing” using pic microcontoller

“Ready for PIC“ is one of MikroElektronika‘s compact prototyping boards for 28 and 40 pin PIC microcontrollers. The board comes with PIC16F887 microcontroller which is preprogrammed with an UART bootloader firmware and thus eliminates the need of an external programmer. The on-board USB-UART module allows the serial data transfer between the PIC and a PC

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Connecting multiple tact switches on a single input pin of a microcontroller1

Connecting multiple tact switches on a single input pin of a microcontroller

Normally one tact switch requires one digital input pin of a microcontroller. Some designs implement keypad style multiplexing to get multiple switches on fewer inputs. However, there exist other techniques that allow you to connect many switches on a single input pin of a microcontroller. This tutorial demonstrates one such technique as applied to PIC12F683

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Expanding the number of I O lines using Microchip MCP23008

Expanding the number of I/O lines using Microchip MCP23008 using pic microcontoller

A microcontroller comes with a limited number of general purpose input and output (GPIO) ports. However, some applications may require more ports than are available on the microcontroller. In such a case, GPIO expanders can be used to increase the I/O capability of the microcontroller. MCP23008 is one such device (manufactured by Microchip Technology) which

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The Most Useless Machine EVER

The Most Useless Machine EVER!

And yet everyone wants one!!!? AKA: The Ultimate Machine! Get Your Useless Machine: Purchase Useless Machine Kits Here! Update Oct 31, 2012: “Weird Al” Yankovic Sez: “I never realized till now how much I needed one of these.” AS SEEN ON TV! Make Magazine’s amiable editor-in-chief, Mark Frauenfelder demonstrated The Useless Machine on the Colbert

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