Sanguinololu 1.3a Soldering Notes
A couple of people have noticed this, so I thought I’d write it up. There’s nothing wrong — it’s just something to be aware of if you’re soldering up a Sanguinololu 1.3a PCB. If you look closely at the circuit…
Category Technology
Free Sanguinololu 1.3a PCBs for Schools
Yeah, free. If you’re starting a 3D printer project (such as RepRap) at your public K-12 school in the United States for the benefit of the students, then we’ll give you a free Sanguinololu v1.3a PCB to help you out…
Mouser Electronics Shipping Costs and Turn-Around Time
The shipping “estimator” at Mouser.com is a little vague, so I thought I’d post the results of a recent order. In general, you’re not going to know the shipping cost or the weight of your order until after it’s shipped.…
My $300 Prusa Mendel Build
I’ve set out to build a Prusa Mendel for $300. So far I think I’m doing pretty well. The top part is what I’ve already picked up, and the bottom part is what I have yet to purchase — that’s…
StickBot – Building the Right Eye
Well, I discovered that Popsicle is a brand name, so I’m officially renaming this little guy “StickBot” so the Popsicle police don’t come after me. To be clear, this little bot has nothing to do with Popsicle brand ice pops,…
A Hackable 12-Channel Bidirectional Logic Level Shifter/Translator
Here’s a video of my very hackable 12-channel logic level shifter/translator with a voltage regulator. This video demonstrates how it works. There’s more detail here at the post. In this example, it’s translating from 7.5V to 3.3V. In another example…
How to Trim 40-Pin Female Headers
40-pin female headers are inexpensive and easy to trim down to size, and with a dot of CA glue (super glue), you can even easily make other configurations, like 2×4. Sometimes they’re even described as “break-away” headers, although admittedly they…
J&M SCR Robot Test-drive
He we’re test-driving the our latest robot creation for the first time. It’s the boy’s design and made mostly of wood. The tires are o-rings, and there’s a 12V AA batter pack sandwiched between the two pieces of plywood. The…
DIY 12-Channel Bidirectional Logic Level Shifter
Here’s a 12-channel bidirectional logic level shifter with a 3.3V power regulator that I designed so I could easily interface 5V circuits with cool 3.3V widgets like the ADXL345 accelerometer, the NRF24L01+ wireless transceiver, and the Nokia 5110 84×48 LCD. For the…
KiCAD / eeschema “Component Load Error”
I used the excellent Quick KICAD Library Component Builder recently to build a new component for eeschema in KiCAD, but when I imported the library, I got an error dialog that said, “Library component load error error <error <pin only…