Comments for Rugged Around The Edges

Comment on BeatVox: making sounds with Arduino by TheKitty

TheKitty — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 22:28:05 +0000

Yes I’m looking at a shield to do audio for a HAL9000 idea but to store clips I’d need the SPI flash writeable also. Has this been implemented yet?

Comment on BeatVox: making sounds with Arduino by vincec

vincec — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:59:35 +0000

Hi, just got my BeatVox shield. Great work! Having fun with trying different sounds and looping. Wondering when you’ll post some methods to storing sounds in the 512K SPI flash chip? the memory in the Arduino runs out pretty fast when your samples get a bit longer than 1/2 sec!

Comment on The Fritzing issue by Blaise Mibeck

Blaise Mibeck — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 01:18:03 +0000

Grumpy Mike is awesome! I agree with your analysis.

Comment on 74AUP1G98 – Two-Input, Low Power, Universal Configurable Logic Gate by InaComputer

InaComputer — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 19:18:07 +0000

Thank you for the information, this is really helpful for me. Hope there will be more in the coming days.

Ashok Sunar
Student in IOE
Pokhara, Nepal

Comment on Microchip ChipKit and Arduino pin compatibility analysis by Gene Apperson

Gene Apperson — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:59:26 +0000

I’m the engineer at Digilent who actually designed the chipKIT boards. (I’ve designed all of Digilent’s microcontroller boards) Mark did the bootloader and the Arduino core files, but didn’t have anything to do with the hardware. The Uno32 actually uses the PIC32MX320F128, not the PIC32MX340. I was thinking PIC32MX340 when I initially designed the board, but the decision was made to use an MX320 part when we went to production.
The combination of 200ohm resistor and diode that is used on the analog pins to get 5V compatibility was modeled by an engineer at Microchip, and produced an almost ideal response curve for the output driving a high impedance input.
As you are no doubt aware, the PIC32 parts only have 5 output compares, so it wasn’t possible to support all six that are on the ATmega328. I arbitrarily decided to do PWM0-4, leaving out 5. Sorry that that negatively impacted your board.
I didn’t like having so many jumpers on the board, but there was no way to support what I considered necessary features without them. Trying to support everything would have yielded an impossibly complicated set of jumpers, so some things (like analog comparators, for example) had to be relegated to the ‘not-compatible’ realm. (Oh Well, you can’t have everything.)
I’m pleased to see that you have a generally positive impression of the Uno32.

Gene

Comment on Ultracapacitors to Boost the Range of Electric Cars by fellowgeek

fellowgeek — Thu, 05 May 2011 23:45:56 +0000

I am working with 1.5F capacitors, and they are amazing, they are so small (a little bigger than a 3V clock battery) yet they can lit an LED and keep it lit for 20 minutes.

Comment on NI Multisim™ Component Evaluator- Analog Devices® Edition by bolson

bolson — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:20:41 +0000

Posted by Bob from Analog Devices.

In this latest release, we added the ability to import models and expanded the component limit from 25 to 50. The intent of this package is to help Analog Devices’ customers quickly evaluate products, it’s generally sufficient for this task.

Multisim continues to be a very popular download on our site http://www.analog.com/multisim since we launched the original ADI version back in 2007. We certainly don’t require our customers to use it but having a good simulator with models already imported that customers can quickly use to evaluate our parts continues to be a popular and useful offering.

Comment on NXP Unveils 30V MOSFET with Lowest RDSon | ECN: Electronic Component News by MOSFET Mike@NXP

MOSFET Mike@NXP — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 13:42:12 +0000

It is fair to say that not everybody needs or appreciates the lowest RDS(on) performance, this particular MOSFET is targetted at very demanding applications such as power-ORing and very high current synchronous buck power supplies. In high performance applications, such as server and base-station power supply, the primary goals are to improve efficiency and reliability since cost of ownership far exceeds the BOM cost for this type of equipment.
The other significant thing to note about this MOSFET is that the gate charge (Qgtot) at 1.1mR is comparable with the older PSMN1R3-30YL (at 1.3mR) and also lower than other competitor types upto about 1.5mR. So NXP figured out how to make a very low RDS(on) MOSFET with very low gate losses, and they optimised it around a gate voltage of 4.5V to provide even more opportunity for the customer to make further savings in the gate drive circuit. The figure of merit (FOM) is industry leading and this technology will be appreciated by a much wider audience as more types become available. Look closely at the website and you will see a few other types are also available today e.g. 4.5mR at 30V and also 4mR at 25V. These types have extremely low gate charge and industry leading FOM when compared to MOSFETs available from other vendors. They will offer designers of high performance power-supply an opportunity to improve on efficiency and to further optimise their products.