I’ve been using Nokia 5110 LCD screens for a while now they’re 84x48px have a built-in back-light and are really easy to use and quite cheap. Recently though whilst working on my drum machine I found myself wishing for a few more pixels. I want to show a “pattern view” of 16 tracks with 16 steps plus some additional information and 84×48 was getting too tight.
This isn’t a Nokia1202, this is a Sparkfun Nokia 5110 breakout
I found some time to convert my hand drawn notes into a proper Eagle Cad schematic.
This is a project I’ve been working on for over a year but haven’t had the time to complete yet. Electronics takes second place to children… 🙂
It’s a mini drum machine modelled on classic machines like the Roland TR808. My version is digital, playing samples rather than analogue and uses a single pic24 to do the work.
Here’s the firmware for my V2 lighthouse PCBs.
If you bought a PCB from me I should have already sent this to you, but I though I had better post it here just in case.
A long exposure makes it look quite funky
My version two charlieplexed lighthouse circuit PCBs (charliediscs) have arrived back from the Seeedstudio’s fab. I used the same deal as for my last boards, this time it took around 3 weeks in total. That’s pretty good for 20USD!
A new TV unit! It's a hybrid of an IKEA Tobo, a bit of Billy and some pine boards.
We’ve been telling ourselves that we’re going to get a new TV for a couple of years and we finally did it. We’re now all super funky flat-screened, just like the popular kids are doing!
A stack of PCBs ready to be assembled
I thought I’d have a go at getting my PWM controller PCB made professionally.
I’ve updated the code to my LED strip driver and included a few new features.
Here’s a quick demo video.
[UPDATE 7 Mar 2011] Added input/output graph plus link to download LUT calc excel file.
[UPDATE : DEC 6 2010] I’ve had some proper PCB’s made for this circuit. More info here.
DSO Nano (Image taken from Seeedstudio.)
A friend asked me about the oscilloscope I was using in my last post, you can see it in the very poor quality video at the end of the post. So I thought I’d make a quick post to explain. It’s called the DSO Nano, it’s sold by Seeedstudio and the short of it is that it’s a fantastic tool for a great price. It is limited in bandwidth, and has only one channel but I love it all the same. It has around 1MHz of analog bandwidth which is admittedly quite low – giving a useable working limit to signals of around 100KHz – but that is more than enough for audio and fine for just about everything I’ve been doing such as debugging my PWM output from my LED fader.
I have been playing around with building a lamp for my desk using a LED strip and constant current driver that I bought from Deal Extreme a while ago combined with a PIC12f683 to provide variable brightness via Pulse Width Modulation (PWM).
The demo using a plain old green LED as the output.
[UPDATE OCT 20 2010] I’ve updated the firmware for this project to include new features. More info and firmware download here.
Catmacey's stuff 