DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

Inspired by Laen's group PCB order and Ladyada's breadboard power supply, I decided to try making one that runs from a single AA battery.

click Read more for schematic and rambling about the design.....

All the material covered in the "Getting Stared With Microcontrollers" workshop, the printed handout and online version, are available if you missed it.

The "Getting Started With Microcontrollers" workshop is coming up, next Monday. It's at Techshop (10100 SW Allen Blvd, Beaverton OR 97005) from 7-9pm, in the upstairs area. Cost is $10 to $40 depending on which parts you need. Here is the sign up link:

http://www.pjrc.com/store/workshop.html

Read on for details about this workshop....

Last night Monty brought a Tektronix MSO2024 oscilloscope to the meeting. I've been very seriously considering buying one of these, or something similar (this model is $5400 new, about double my budget, though some lesser models are around $3200). Read on for a lengthy writeup of how it went....

I released a new version of Teensyduino today, which adds USB-serial extensions to the Arduino Serial object. Now it's possible to use the Teensy via the Arduino IDE for in sorts of new ways.

For example, the Teensy can be programmed to work as a Benito.

Here is the simple sketch that makes it work.....

The new teensy board was released a couple days ago. Here's a picture. The actual size is the same as a DIP-40 chip.

Today I released the 2nd beta version of Teensyduino, my add-on package for Arduino-0012 that allows sketches to be built and run on the Teensy USB board. Version 0.2 fixes many bugs and has more robust coordination between the Arduino IDE and the Teensy Loader.

It turned out to be a lot more work than I expected, but finally I've released the first beta test of Teensyduino, an add-on package for Arduino-0012 that adds support for the Teensy! I even wrote a nice gui-based installer (works on Mac, Linux and Windows).

The Teensy USB Development Board is finally released! I'm still writing more web pages and working on easier example code, but everything really necessary is available.

If you want to get it at the next meeting, just place an order with the website and in the comment box on step 3, just type something like "bring to dorkbot meeting", and of course you won't get charged any shipping.

Here are a couple pictures.

I'm getting close to making the LCDs work from Ben's Micro 2700 POS terminals (several of them are still up for grabs). Here's a photo.

More photos and technical details below...

First, I cut out almost all the chips. Here's a photos taken before I chopped all the chips off.