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SatNOGS is the 2014 Hackaday Prize winner

Posted on November 13, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Hackaday has announced the grand prize winner of the 2014 Hackaday Prize today. The winner is SatNOGs, a complete platform of an open-source satellite ground station built from readily available and affordable tools and resources. Hackaday writes, It opens up the use of satellite data to a much wider range of humanity by providing plans to build satellite tracking stations, and a protocol and framework to share the satellite data with those that cannot afford, or lack the skills to build their own tracking station. The hardware itself is based on readily available materials, commodity electronics, and just a bit of

Microchip announces new 16-bit A/D converters with 200Msps sampling rate

Posted on November 12, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Microchip Technology Inc. has announced two families of new high-speed A/D converters in the MCP37DX1-200 and MCP372X1-200 families. These families feature 12-, 14- and 16-bit pipelined A/D converters with a maximum sampling rate of 200 Mega samples per second (Msps). The 14- and 16-bit devices feature high accuracy of over 74 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and over 90 dB Spurious Free Dynamic Range (SFDR), while the 12-bit devices have 71.3 dB SNR and 90 dB SFDR. This enables high-precision measurements of fast input signals. These families operate at very low-power consumption of 490 mW at 200 Msps including LVDS digital

FlowPaw: A new rapid prototyping tool for electronics and robotics

Posted on October 30, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

With so many other development platforms already out there in market, DSP Robotics, in collaboration with MikroElektronika, is going to introduce a new tool, FlowPaw, for rapid prototyping with electronics and robotics. FlowPaw is an expandable development board that carries a STM32F415RG MCU and four mikroBUS™ sockets, which provides a simple Plug-and-Play solution for connecting mikroElektronika’s several dozens of accessory boards called Click Boards. The Click boards are available for a wide range of applications including GPS, WiFi, MP3 decoding, Bluetooth, CAN, IrDA, GSM, and Ethernet. The FlowPaw is programmed directly through a PC USB port using FlowStone, a drag-and-drop

Learning optoisolators by making one

Posted on October 11, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Optoisolators, also known as optocouplers or photocouplers, are a very useful component in transferring electrical signals between two circuit blocks, while providing a complete electrical isolation between the two blocks. The key advantage of using an optoisolator is it blocks high voltages and voltage transients in one block being transferred to other, so that a surge in one part of the system will not disrupt or destroy the other parts. An opto-isolator connects the two blocks with a beam of light, which is modulated by input current. In this tutorial, Dan explains the basics of optoisolators and illustrates its working principle by

MPLAB® Harmony supports all 32-bit PIC® MCUs

Posted on October 8, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, today announced the availability of MPLAB® Harmony Version 1.0. MPLAB Harmony is a flexible, abstracted, fully integrated firmware development platform for all 32-bit PIC32 microcontrollers (MCUs). It takes key elements of modular and object-oriented design, adds in the flexibility to use a RTOS or work without one, and provides a framework of software modules that are easy to use, configurable for specific design requirements and that are purpose built to work together. The new features in this release include the MPLAB Harmony Configurator for quick and easy driver and middleware

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