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Category Archives: Product Review

Making a SPL dB Meter

Posted on June 19, 2019 by Shawon Shahryiar 14 comments

In the 1980s, there was no internet as like today and so the sources of entertainment were televisions, radios and cassette players. When I was a kid, we had an audio cassette player. We used it to play songs but my imagination was always fixed to its VU meter display with its fancy readings as shown below. It changed with the volume of the speakers and matched rhythmically with the sound coming out of it. During my engineering career, I got to know about the Decibel scale and sound pressure measurement. It soon became a goal for me to design

Product review: Elecrow’s 7″ HDMI LCD Display for Raspberry Pi

Posted on December 8, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

A colorful LCD display is always a great add-on to any Raspberry Pi project. This article provides a quick review of a high resolution (1024×600 pixels) 7″ HDMI LCD product from Elecrow and illustrates a simple way to set it up for Raspberry Pi. With HDMI support, built-in capacitive touchscreen control, and 4 mountable corners, this LCD is a perfect Plug-n-Play display for use with single board computers like Raspberry Pi and Banana Pi. It comes with an HDMI cable for the display, an USB cable for touchscreen control, four mounting screws, and a DVD containing the driver softwares. Hardware connections and software setup The setup

PCB assembly at Elecrow

Posted on October 13, 2016 by R-B 4 comments

I have been asked a few times about where I make all of my PCBs and boards. So I thought I should share that experience here, which is what this blog post is about. In past 5 years, I have used PCB services from several companies, including Itead, Seeed, Elecrow, and Oshpark. There is no doubt that the Oshpark PCBs are far superior than the first 3 Chinese vendors. The downside of Oshpark is the cost of manufacturing is much higher, specially for larger size boards. Among Itead, Seeed, and Elecrow, I have never really noticed any differences in the

Quick Review of a cheap Chinese component tester

Posted on April 24, 2015 by R-B Leave a comment

Adam Fabio has posted a quick review of a cheap Chinese brand multifunctional component tester on Hackaday. He found its build quality was very cheap, but he was also amazed with its features and functionalities, including ohmmeter, capacitance meter, transistor tester, etc, which worked amazingly well with a reasonable accuracy. Powered with Atmega328 microcontroller, this component tester can be purchased for ~ $20 on eBay and Aliexpress. I didn’t have huge expectations for the tester, but I hoped it would at least power up. Hooking up a 9 volt battery and pressing the magic button brought the tester to life.

Product review: EasyPIC v7 development board

Posted on March 31, 2014 by R-B 6 comments

MikroElektronika, a Belgrade, Serbia-based company is well-known for producing quality software and hardware development tools for a wide range of microcontroller families, including PIC, AVR, and ARM processors. Their mikroC Pro for PIC has always been my favorite PIC compiler, and has been extensively used in my PIC tutorials and projects published on this website, for its ease of use and rich set of built-in library routines. Today, I am reviewing MikroElektronika’s EasyPIC v7, which is the latest PIC development board in their line of EasyPIC series. I would like to thank to Newark USA for providing the EasyPIC v7 board

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