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I botched the link.... Try this: DigiKey

Or, by the same exact battery from DigiKey for $23.

Whenever you see somebody selling a battery for too much, don't forget that they need to buy it from somewhere, and they need to make a profit. Most industrial rechargeable batteries you'll find on replacement sites are sourced through DigiKey or Newark, and the manufacturer's markings are usually left intact on the original battery. Just head over to one of those sites and type in the part number. You'll usually see a 50%+ savings. This goes for UPS batteries too!

Most of the stuff I was building at the time, I would decide whether or not I wanted to go 8085, 65C02, or 68000 depending on how much processor power, electrical power, and cost tradeoffs, and go from there. (Yeh, I knew about the RCA 1802, and absolutely hated to code assembler for it.)

Looking back on it, I think the main reason I went Motorola for all my 32-bit stuff is I got ahold of one of the chip kits pretty soon after it came out, and learned enough to make functional devices with it. Then I was soundly in the rut with insufficient motivation to jump out. Intel made some neat stuff, but I considered the Motorola implementations much cleaner from a hardware point of view, despite the fact PC's were running Intel processors.

Today, my main choices are the ATMEL AVR/ATMEGA series , and the Motorola 320X0's. Incidentally, I think ATMEL has done a helluva job supporting us little guys in the trenches with all sorts of nifty tools on their website, development kits, and making sure places which deal a lot with us little guys, like Digi-Key , have a wide selection of product for us.

I do get concerned at Motorola though, as they seem to keep changing their product. To me, implementing a product in a design is a lot like my selection of building materials... if I do not have confidence that ten years from now, I will be able to obtain compatible materials, I go back to my design and change it to use something more generic. Yes, the 68000 is old hat - but it is exactly what I needed to do a job at hand. Example: I like to design with standard brick. I am quite leery of custom roofing material or exotic plumbing fixtures. Just because something is old does not mean you have to abandon making it. ( 68000 in the 64-pin plastic DIP package for PTH mounting ). To me, that makes just about as much sense as no longer making 100 watt incandescent light bulbs in an Edison base.

If any Motorola rep is out there reading this, please cut this out and hand it to management. You guys can really make us little guys in the trenches look bad when no sooner than we get our customer all geared up for production and the rug gets pulled on us. They blame me for it. ( Rightfully so, cause people like me should know who it is out there who won't stay on the ship long enough to complete the voyage. ) If you percieve that I am both disappointed and angry about discontinuation of this product, you are right.

broken link

Here is a link to the PDF

Caps up to 50 farads at 2.5 volts..

Small too, the 50 farad ones are only 1.8cm diameter, and 4cm long. Course charging it at 2.5 volts still only gives you just over 300 joules. And the cap IS 25 canadian..but still, good stuff.

10F at 2.5v

So as long as you filter out the CCD-sensitive and visible light ranges, you can do it stealthily with a strobe light. But strobe lights are unwieldly. I understand most CCDs (even monochrome) start really cutting at out 900.

I would try with an IR diode at about 1000nm

If you're just looking to work with a small microprocessor/computer to get that nostalgic feel, just take a modern microcontroller and start breadboarding.

Microcontroller products from Microchip and Atmel fit the bill nicely.

For support and help with Microchip PIC microcontroller development, you can hardly go wrong with the MIT-PICList, and for Atmel AVR micros AVRFreaks is the place to go.

Then you'll probably find yourself over at DigiKey buying parts for your projects after you have gained some insight into just how cool it is to have a 40 MHz processor with 2K or more of FLASH RAM on-board in a 18-pin device right at your fingertips that only needs a PC and some imagination to program to act like just about any logic device.

Have fun twiddling those bits, boys and girls.

Many of the current MCUs are ball grid array (BGA) devices, which make them pretty hard to work with if you're not a professional, but a few can be had in PLCC or QFP packages, which means you can get an adapter board or socket.

You can also buy preassembled demo/development boards (this is the route I'm taking) and wire-up anything the board doesn't include by hand. Most of the MCUs on the market will have 32-bit memory busses (though they may not support more that 25 or 26 address lines), so you can attach just about anything you want to them.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Steve Ciarcia (of Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar) used to do: building personal computers from microcontrollers. Most of his designs used Z80 based devices, which was fine back in the mid- to late-eighties. Now, however, you can do a fair bit better.

As for speed, I don't know exactly what you're looking for, but the ARM devices can be had in speeds from 50MHz to 400MHz, and the same is true of the PPC and MIPS devices. That may not seem like much, compared to a 2GHz Pentium, but it's really quite nice.

Some good resources: Digi-Key is a reasonable source for all sorts of parts, Atmel makes some nice MCUs, programmable logic, and Flash RAM, Cirrus Logic makes some ARM MCUs and networking chips (amoung other things), Sharp, Samsung, Motorola, and AMD all make nice MCUs, Cogent Computers builds some nice development boards, and EarthLCD has good prices on LCDs and has an ARM based board in the works.

Type aerogel into digikey's part search. You'll see capacitors rated at tens of farads.

Before you reply, yes I know those aren't rated for 600V, but my point is that 1F capacitors are no longer quite so extraordinary.

The Winbond chip is pretty specific to its application, that is, making motherboard clocks. There are much better serial programmable devices that can provide a wider range of frequencies. You can get Cypress ones at Digi-Key)

Also for more accuracy, you can stack them and refactor P and Q over multiple dividers. On one project (an MPEG encoder) I did just that to make a low-jitter fully-locked 16.9344 / 12.288 / 18.432 audio reference from 27 MHz video. Each PLL was less than $2, and I used an 8051 to control it.

There are also specialty PLL chips used for cellphones that provide good accuracy using some voodoo in their dividers.

- dvd_tude

For anyone who is actually considering Radio Shack as anything other than an emergency refuge for "awk, I ran out of solder and I need to finish this!"... Radio Shack does not even sell electronics stuff around here anymore. Maybe a bit of soldering equipment, and some connectors, but for actual electronics? Nah. They are morphing into a half-assed Electronics Boutique but with more annoying salespeople. I am fairly certain from other people's stories that this is a trend that is continuing everywhere in the Radio Shack chain.

You're better off finding a real electronics store, or going mail-order. DigiKey is a decent mail-order place for USA/Canada/UK. You will find their selection very refreshing.

But for storing data the FLASH might be good.

At Digikey you can purchase 10 128MB compact FLASH for $524.42(US). That is a total of 1280 MB of FLASH...

I doubt that the entire disksystem will go over to solid state. Why would you bother? For a lot of things the hard drives are more than fast enough. So you could add in FLASH or something as another level between RAM and Hard Drive. That way the entire program that needs fast access to data could be loaded into FLASH. So if your playing a game the entire game-system could be loaded onto a few gigs of FLASH, for fast access to loading the maps or something. When you finish with the game, the files that have changed on the FLASH (such a a config file) is copied back to the hard drive.

If it uses a 32kHz crystal (like mentioned in the patents), then these circumvention devices wouldn't be allowed under the DMCA:

38.4 kHz crystal (17% faster)
40 kHz crystal (22% faster)

What copyright you ask? The microcode, of course. That line of thinking is working so far for lexmark. But, we don't really need the DMCA to make crystals illegal. You can also get 34 (+3.7%), 36 (+10%), and 38 (+16%), and 44.1kHz (+35%) crystals easily...

A much better solution for intel would be to have a ring oscillator on the chip and compare the input frequency to that... but that would defeat the whole purpose -- you'd be limited to the actual rating of the chip (because faster chips would have faster ring oscillators), not the rating intel sells the chip at.

If it uses a 32kHz crystal (like mentioned in the patents), then these circumvention devices wouldn't be allowed under the DMCA:

38.4 kHz crystal (17% faster)
40 kHz crystal (22% faster)

What copyright you ask? The microcode, of course. That line of thinking is working so far for lexmark. But, we don't really need the DMCA to make crystals illegal. You can also get 34 (+3.7%), 36 (+10%), and 38 (+16%), and 44.1kHz (+35%) crystals easily...

A much better solution for intel would be to have a ring oscillator on the chip and compare the input frequency to that... but that would defeat the whole purpose -- you'd be limited to the actual rating of the chip (because faster chips would have faster ring oscillators), not the rating intel sells the chip at.

You can get equivalent LEDs cheaper at digikey. They're order of 30 cents there for very bright LEDs, except the blue ones which are not quite a dollar.

Lotsa links here...

First of all, the 2002 Burning Man project I did that involved a couple hundred RGB LEDs spinning in a persistence-of-vision-based nighttime animated display. Here is the best picture of it. This is the page about the development details.

The LEDs I used were manufactured by Kingbright. The model I used, the LF819EMBGMBC, is big (10mm) and relatively bright for an RGB LED. I couldn't find any U.S. retailers that actually told the truth about whether they stocked them, so I ended up buying 400 directly from Kingbright for I think a little more than $2.50 each. I still have a few left.

Atmel AVR microcontrollers are just a few bucks each, easily programmable with the STK-500 programmer, also cheap at around $80. I used the ATMega8, which was more than sufficient for my needs. I imagine the original Slashdotter could use one of the ATTiny MCUs, since it really needs only 3 or 4 I/O lines (fewer depending on how many helper circuits you decide to use).

The boards were manufactured by PCBExpress and I was very happy with them. The CAD/CAM software was Eagle, which except for some crashing/redrawing bugs was really amazing. The version I used was free. I tried to buy it but CadSoft has (had?) a fairly crazy pricing scheme that actually left you worse off in terms of acceptable usage if you paid them money than if you used the free version.

The best part of using the Atmel MCU was that GCC can cross-compile for it. So you're basically writing regular old C code but it runs on a little tiny piece of silicon. You'll want to subscribe to the quite active avr-gcc mailing list. Save every message from Marek Michalkiewicz; in my opinion he's the god of GCC-for-AVR development.

My understanding from surfing RadioShack Sucks is that their salesdroids would actually be penalized financially, or even fired altogether, for failing to obtain some arbitrary percentage of customer names and addresses. Seems like the quota was something on the order of 80-90% "compliance."

Between local stores like Active Electronics, the utterly-amazing variety of electronic parts on eBay and topnotch mail-order houses like Digi-Key, Jameco, and Mouser, it's pretty darned rare for me to set foot in a RatShit store these days. Their 1/4-watt resistor assortments are still a killer deal, though.

Is there any particular reason to be using copper?

I mean, sure: it's a fine conductor. But for soaking up RF in the context of a home computer, it would seem that steel would work fine. And rather than being ~$3/ft^2, steel is usually of negligible cost.

The best place to look for this sort of stuff is not at a business selling fabric to housewives or mail-order distributors, but your neighborhood hardware store. Not Lowe's or Home Depot, but the tired-looking place downtown that sells shotgun shells out of the same glass display case that props up their singular cash register.

In this store, you will find a man who looks as old as the building. He will be helpful. You'll either be directed toward the precise item that you're looking for, be able to order it for little cost, or be given information about another tired-looking local business that specializes in such things as wire mesh.

Myself, I've seen copper window screen sold in these places, by the foot. No idea if the holes are too big for the frequencies in question.

Failing that, there's other options. AFAIK, the requirements for a Faraday cage do not stipulate that the material must be hole-y.

From the same hardware merchant (or any of the fabric stores that you're so fond of), you'll be able to buy a can of spray-on adhesive. From your local food service vendor, you'll be able to buy a wide roll of aluminum foil.

You'll need one (1) aerosol can of adhesive, and one (1) roll of foil.

Apply adhesive according to directions on label. Apply foil according to common sense, bearing in mind that the adhesive will not let go of the foil, ever. If grounding connections must be made between movable portions of the case (side panels, for instance), make sure that the foil is applied in such a way that they're able to touch eachother with at least slight pressure.

Or, if you want to be a pedant, join the sections together with copper foil tape.

Done. Time saved: days. Money saved: At least $65.

[OT: What, pray tell, is Slashdot's average IQ these days? I deal with stupid, helpless people for a living, but I'm often amazed by what I discover on these pages.]

>Forgive me if I sound a bit naive but wouldn't parallel be faster than serial?

Yes, but just like with memory, serial is cheap, parallel costs. Those extra wires just ain't free.

>Forgive me if I sound a bit naive but wouldn't parallel be faster than serial?

Yes, but just like with memory, serial is cheap, parallel costs. Those extra wires just ain't free.

Ambient temperatures of 100F aren't hazardous to most consumer electronics. In terms of durability: Given exclusion from severe catastrophic failure syndrome catalysts such as lightning strikes and 2-year-old children, anything in your cabinet which doesn't rely on moving parts is very likely to outlive you and a number of your descendants.

That said, neither the bearings in your DVD player nor the VHS tapes you play are likely to be happy, long-term, with such elevated temperature.

Additionally, the properties of the individual components (caps, resistors, transistors) change with temperature, so well-designed analog electronics are engineered with a specific temperature range in mind. They'll certainly sound best when operated at whatever ambient temperature they were designed for, which is likely to be at or slightly above room temperature (72F).

The thermal switch in your amp is not likely to trip until the heatsink is justabout hot enough to boil water. It exists as a safety feature, like a fuse, to turn things off under abusive situations or in catastrophic modes of failure. It is not, in any way, a device intended to ensure proper fidelity.

My parents have a similar situation at their house. They've got a 36" Sony CRT, on top of a glass-doored Sony stand. Inside this stand resides all of the extra components associated with the TV - a DVD player, VCR, and DirecTV TiVo.

After adding an 80-gig, 7200RPM Maxtor to the TiVo, things would get hot enough inside of the cabinet that the TiVo would lock hard every couple of days.

They simply removed the glass doors, and everything has been rock-solid stable since.

I recommend you do the same.

Not only will your components be more accessible, you won't need to worry about things being too hot. It's also free.

In my own living room, I solve the heat problem differently. I've got the line-level (minimal BTW/hr) stereo components stacked neatly on a shelf, the TV on its own seperate stand along with the PSX and DVD player, and a fan-cooled power amp in its own rack back in the far corner of the room, hidden behind a plush chair.

By spreading things out and avoiding confining furniture, heat becomes a non-issue. And I also get to keep the more dangerous components (the ones with volume controls, capable of producing dangerously-loud, eviction-level radio static) up out of reach of my 2-year-old daughter.

If none of these solutions are appealing, simply install a largish, slow-moving fan near the top of whatever cavity houses your AV components, exhausting air out the back. Maybe something like this would do the trick. If such an arrangment turns out to be too loud, wire a rheostat in series with it to slow it down even more.

You could also use a low-voltage DC fan, but it'd take all of the fun out of it and require the use of a seperate power supply.

Whichever the case, the purpose here is not to actively cool the components, but to simply provide a mechanism for exchanging the stale, warm air inside of a cabinet with cooler air from outside, be it by convection (avoidance of enclosed cabinets and glass doors) or force (a fan to push things around).

It won't take much.

Ambient temperatures of 100F aren't hazardous to most consumer electronics. In terms of durability: Given exclusion from severe catastrophic failure syndrome catalysts such as lightning strikes and 2-year-old children, anything in your cabinet which doesn't rely on moving parts is very likely to outlive you and a number of your descendants.

That said, neither the bearings in your DVD player nor the VHS tapes you play are likely to be happy, long-term, with such elevated temperature.

Additionally, the properties of the individual components (caps, resistors, transistors) change with temperature, so well-designed analog electronics are engineered with a specific temperature range in mind. They'll certainly sound best when operated at whatever ambient temperature they were designed for, which is likely to be at or slightly above room temperature (72F).

The thermal switch in your amp is not likely to trip until the heatsink is justabout hot enough to boil water. It exists as a safety feature, like a fuse, to turn things off under abusive situations or in catastrophic modes of failure. It is not, in any way, a device intended to ensure proper fidelity.

My parents have a similar situation at their house. They've got a 36" Sony CRT, on top of a glass-doored Sony stand. Inside this stand resides all of the extra components associated with the TV - a DVD player, VCR, and DirecTV TiVo.

After adding an 80-gig, 7200RPM Maxtor to the TiVo, things would get hot enough inside of the cabinet that the TiVo would lock hard every couple of days.

They simply removed the glass doors, and everything has been rock-solid stable since.

I recommend you do the same.

Not only will your components be more accessible, you won't need to worry about things being too hot. It's also free.

In my own living room, I solve the heat problem differently. I've got the line-level (minimal BTW/hr) stereo components stacked neatly on a shelf, the TV on its own seperate stand along with the PSX and DVD player, and a fan-cooled power amp in its own rack back in the far corner of the room, hidden behind a plush chair.

By spreading things out and avoiding confining furniture, heat becomes a non-issue. And I also get to keep the more dangerous components (the ones with volume controls, capable of producing dangerously-loud, eviction-level radio static) up out of reach of my 2-year-old daughter.

If none of these solutions are appealing, simply install a largish, slow-moving fan near the top of whatever cavity houses your AV components, exhausting air out the back. Maybe something like this would do the trick. If such an arrangment turns out to be too loud, wire a rheostat in series with it to slow it down even more.

You could also use a low-voltage DC fan, but it'd take all of the fun out of it and require the use of a seperate power supply.

Whichever the case, the purpose here is not to actively cool the components, but to simply provide a mechanism for exchanging the stale, warm air inside of a cabinet with cooler air from outside, be it by convection (avoidance of enclosed cabinets and glass doors) or force (a fan to push things around).

It won't take much.

According to this document, AGX-type fuses are direcctly interchangable with 8AG-type fuses.

8A, 250V 8AG fuses made by Littelfuse, Inc. may be found here. $0.274 ea, minimum quantity of 5. 2,655 in stock.

NEXT!

I found such a component on digikey yesterday acutally. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but it seems quite nice.

"QProx(tm) QT110/QT110H Charge-Transfer Touch Sensor"
datasheet
related products

Digi-Key part number 427-1006-ND. Available in single units for 2.53USD. 8-]

I found such a component on digikey yesterday acutally. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but it seems quite nice.

"QProx(tm) QT110/QT110H Charge-Transfer Touch Sensor"
datasheet
related products

Digi-Key part number 427-1006-ND. Available in single units for 2.53USD. 8-]

... you can buy 200 250V/120uF caps from digikey for around $1.15 per if you buy 200, or $2.15 in one-sy quantities. The time necessary to disassemble all the cameras is probably worth more than that to me (although I probably wouldn't have enough drive to build the gauss gun anyway).

• Any FPGA design can be converted into an ASIC design with minimal or zero modifications, and usually with a substaintial performance improvement. There are several companies out there that will take your synthesized netlist and give you an ASIC, and will do it cheaply. The FPGA vs ASIC break even point is in the ball part of 100,000 units and it's getting better every day.

• While it may take a Virtex-II to compete with a decent accelerator for all applications, it may be possible to have multiple optimized implementation that are specific to specific applications. For instance, you could program the FPGA with an image optimized for 2D applications for general purpose use and then reprogram it with an image optimized for 3D applications as soon as you run your favorite FPS. Also, A decent sized Virtex-II can be purchased for US $323 in single quantities, and roughly half that in quantities of 1,000 or more.

• Design tools from Xilinx are less than US $1,000. And if you use their web-based tools, they are free.

• The circuit board would not be a major problem. I recently designed a PCI board with an FPGA and SDRAM on it (and wrote the FPGA code) and we got our 10 board for less than US $2,000. Most of this is set up cost, of course, so it gets really cheap really quickly as the numbers go up.

• 266 Mhz DDR RAM really only runs at 133 Mhz, and high end FPGAs can run at 300 Mhz. FPGA vendors often have hardware build into the FPGA to suppport high speed interfaces like that, or provide HDL source so that you can implement your own.

• Even if it takes 5A to run these chips (slightly excessive IMHO), the requirement is at the core voltage (1.5V for the Virtex-II mentioned earlier). With a 85% efficient switching regulator (typical), that would equal 2.7A @ 3.3V or 1.8A @ 5V or 750mA @ 12V (all of which are available on the AGP connector). Besides 5A @ 1.5V is just 8W after you include the switching inefficies, and you probably have at least a 300W power supply, so it's less than 3% of your total power budget.

• We do need to factor in assembly costs, which for a prototype run of 10 boards is going to to be about $3000 total, but the costs get really cheap if the quantity goes up, especially if the through-hole components are soldered by the enthusiasts who buy these cards.

  So, you don't really need all that much capital, and the open-source development model will provide the large teams of engineers.

  Unfortunately I can't contribute to this project because I code not in VHDL but in Verilog (which gets a lot more done for the same amount of effort in my opinion and others here and here).

Try Mouser Electronics or Digi-Key.

If I remember right, Jameco's online site only has a subset of their inventory. For maximum browsing enjoyment, get their dead-tree catalog.

Great company, highly recommended. I've ordered from them on and off since I was in high school, way back in the 70's. (That's back when people still played with electronics as a hobby, and Edmund Scientific had some of the coolest, most exotic stuff I'd ever seen.)

*DigiKey and Mouser are more focused on commercial users, but they're great sources for hard-to-find parts, or a specific variant of a part.

>Cool site, but I don't know if you will save money.

It may, it may not. It all depends on what kind of a deal you get on the parts. For me, I'm lucky to have a store that sells parts for about the same price as digikey nearby.

For me, that project cost about $20/CAN (a lot of parts were free leftovers from old projects, though).

I'd expect if you weren't as lucky as me, you'd spend a good $60 at Radio Shack. :-)

what about power density? how large is that 50 F capacitor? how about its mass?

Dunno about the mass. Dimensions are 18mm diameter by 40mm length. Look at part#P11066-ND near the middle of this page(pdf).

Another caveat: The power supply is external, but I didn't see any pictures of it on their website.

The specs are a bit confusing, but it looks like the thing takes 12-24V DC, and there is an optional AC adapter that can supply this (the detailed spec sheets were slashdotted). It's probably cutely packaged in a form factor similar to the PC. Here are the specs:

Input Voltage:12V - 24V DC-Input
Powersupply: 110/220V (60/50Hz)
Powerconsumtion: typ. 40W (700MHz)

For a general idea of what this external power supply could look like, check these power supplies from digikey; look for the specs above.

Here's one possible example (the surge/max current may be more, so to really pick the right supply you'd need more data):
FW50 (12 or 24v, 50W) 5"x3"x1.3" $54
EPS169-ND (24v, 50W) 4.1"x2.1"x1.2" $82.80

Think notebook power supply size.

Wearables Central is a good place to start. People lookinto wearable computers have been looking for hardware that is both small and low powered. Plus many of them have been interested in sound. Something about needing it for speach recognition and sound output. You don't have a much space constraints so you could go with a dedicated sound board. I'd look into PC-104 based single board computes then add a sound board. For the screen, choose one from those supported by the SBC. For harddisk I'd use two laptop drives used in mirrored mode. That way if one fails, the other can take up the task. Case wise I'd get one of the standard PC-104 extruded AL cases, and add rubber bumpers. Power can come from a wall brick. Check out DigiKey. Personally I'd expect one of them DVD-RAM drives to die from vibration long before a good laptop HD would.

I seem to remember: 190 volts minimum at 3 to 5 milliamps. Discouraging if you want to use batteries.

Big whoop. It's not hard to make a switching power supply that will give you whatever voltage you want from a battery supply. Lots of sample circuits are out there.

You can also buy inexpensive inverter modules that make 100VAC from a battery supply - typically used for powering LCD electroluminescent backlights. Seach on digikey for "backlight inverter".

1. Suppliers

Digikey absolutely rules. Largest variety of everything electronic. Very easily-navigated site. No minimum order ($5 handling charge if your order is under $25).

Jameco is a good second choice. Especially good for lots of different cheap power supplies.

With Radio Shack, this should be all you need for now.

2. Learning Resources

Someone already pointed you to the various cookbooks. TTL cookbooks are especially good places to start at your level.

A great online resource used to be ePanorama.net, but they're 404ing at the moment, so maybe they're gone for good and they'll be back.

Circuits Archive has lots of simple circuits you can peruse to see how stuff gets done at the lowest level, just like the cookbooks.

3. Advice

Stay away from FPGAs initially. I think you'll find the architecture and associated design process too big a piece to bite off at this point, and not worth the effort.

Focus on TTL and learning what functions are available in various packages (track down an old "TTL Databook" from TI; they don't print them anymore but they're much handier for learning and browsing than online equivalents, which assume youknow what you're looking for). See this for high-level descriptions and this for pdfs of actual datasheets.

When you're ready (which might be immediately) choose a microcontroller family to bone up on and stick with it. It's a huge waste of effort relearning architectures, instruction sets, and development tools for different families. For your purposes, either the PIC (from Microchip), 8051 (Intel et al.), or AVR (Atmel) will do fine (and they're all available from Digikey). I chose the AVR for the following reasons:

a) Wide (enough) range of parts, from 8-pin to 64-pin, 1K ROM to 128K ROM, various arrangments of on-chip peripherals (including A/D).

b) Cheap, from under $2/chip (single-piece) to under $30 for their fanciest.

c) ALL members of the AVR family contain on-chip FLASH ROM for program storage and can be programmed in-system directly via your PC serial port. This makes a HUGE difference (compared to external ROMs or on-chip EPROM) during prototyping.

Some people will suggest the BASIC Stamp from Parallax, which is a fine product which I've played with. My beef with it is it's expensive ($30 or so, I think) and all you really get for the money is a Basic intepreter. I think you'll find assembler for these chips so simple you don't need Basic. You can also get separate free Basic compilers for all of them.

Good luck.

Starting on page 211, and going on for dozens of pages, in this 30.7MB PDF file, there are ways of getting started, and you can see how much it will cost you.

No. I am not spamming. I'm just trying to help, and I don't work at Digikey.

Starting on page 211, and going on for dozens of pages, in this 30.7MB PDF file, there are ways of getting started, and you can see how much it will cost you.

No. I am not spamming. I'm just trying to help, and I don't work at Digikey.

Assuming you want .1" jumpers:

In the lower right hand corner of P65. or in the lower left of P66

other sizes are available too.

Mouser probally has them too.

Assuming you want .1" jumpers:

In the lower right hand corner of P65. or in the lower left of P66

other sizes are available too.

Mouser probally has them too.

Assuming you want .1" jumpers:

In the lower right hand corner of P65. or in the lower left of P66

other sizes are available too.

Mouser probally has them too.

• .100 P/N A26228-ND for 9 cents
• .200 P/N A26232-ND for $0.49
• and the 2mm mircoscopic finger confusers
  2mm P/N A26244-ND for 0.26

where can I buy a VFD?

The display we're using costs $92.2 in single QTY, and you can get them from Digikey.

Digikey carries the full Noritake line. They also have some smaller displays and some graphic ones.

how much power does a VFD consume?

There's a copy of the data sheet in our CVS repository if you're interested. The 40x2 uses about 450ma @ 5V, IIRC.

can one be plugged into a COM port?

No, it uses an 8 bit parallel interface, the same as standard LCD modules. The interface is pretty simple, I'm sure there are some examples out on the web of how to hook one up to your parallel port.

where can I buy a VFD?

The display we're using costs $92.2 in single QTY, and you can get them from Digikey.

Digikey carries the full Noritake line. They also have some smaller displays and some graphic ones.

how much power does a VFD consume?

There's a copy of the data sheet in our CVS repository if you're interested. The 40x2 uses about 450ma @ 5V, IIRC.

can one be plugged into a COM port?

No, it uses an 8 bit parallel interface, the same as standard LCD modules. The interface is pretty simple, I'm sure there are some examples out on the web of how to hook one up to your parallel port.

Okay, I've looked into some IC's to get this thing to work.

First, you need to convert analog to digital. I found what looks to be a decent A/D converter (12 bits, so with 0-+5V input, you get resolution of ~.001V) at DigiKey. This also has a "MicroWire" interface which is what the USB controller speaks.

Then, you'll need some way to talk to the USB bus, where the National Semiconductor USBN604 would work. I have no idea how to program this thing, but after reading the docs I know how to get a circut working between this and the A/D converter (I think).

On the analog lines, you'll want a (big) transistor to transpose the input voltage on a regulated 5v line. You might want a bargraph display on this 5v line, and a potentiometer to adjust input to fit a nice range.

I imagine that it would easy to create a frequency generator using a D/A converter connected to the USB chip. Here the IC would output 5v, so you'd want to connect an external power source and drive that with some transistors (+ and ground). You might want some sort of buffer to do constant waves; thus saving USB bandwidth.

Okay, those are pretty much my ideas for now. Time to do more research and draw some diagrams with xfig. I'll probably post some stuff on my site shortly. (How helpful, huh... now I'm obligated!)

• Marlin P. Jones - Cheap surplus stuff. May or may not work
  
• Mouser - My favorite catalog right now. A whole lot of stuff, good prices. Look in the Jameco catalog to find what you want (nice color pictures help), and actually order it from Mouser (which has a boring catalog).
  
• Digikey - order anything here you can't get from Mouser.
  
• Radio Shack - if you don't mind paying a 400% markup ($1.50 for a quad NAND gate??!) or if you need it at 6pm on a Saturday night, suck it up and go here
  
• Fry's - last I was in the valley, they had a pretty low selection compared to a real distributor. Prices were better than Radio Shack though.
  

If you want ideas for a project, hanging around in the back of Radio Shack might get you started, but I'd encourage you to read manufacturer app notes. Phillips has all sorts of consumer audio/video stuff you could build all laid out in their app notes.

Check out things like the PIC or SX microcontrollers. For ~$10 you and the price of a cheap ROM programmer kit, you can have incredible design flexibility

Yeah, there's a certain appeal to using lots of 74xx chips, but there's really no reason to when it's smaller, cheaper, and much more flexible when you put it on a microcontroller. And VHDL/Verilog may both suck at first compared to the beauty of _real_ hardware, but their potential for semi-intelligent glue logic between your microcontrollers, memory, system busses, etc cannot be overlooked. And, unlike 74xx's, you can rewire without laying out your entire circuit again.

I live in Canada, so my experiences are probably different than any of the Merkins around here.

UPS: These guys really suck nasty ass when you live in eastern Canada. They don't actaually operate here. It gets passed on to Sameday (Someday) courier. I bought a laptop from Egghead which took a month to get here. There is no such thing as "air shipping" around here as far as UPS is concerned, even though their major call center is in New Brunswick. Worse than that, they pull a "Microsoft" by making their customers (including Matrix Orbital, sigh) sign a contract forcing them to use only UPS, even though the customers pay for it. I have tried numerous times to use Fedex or Purolator, to no avail. Even USPS is way better, IMO.

Fedex: No trouble. No problems. I have never had trouble with these guys. I recommend them if you're Canadian.

Purolator: Yes and no, mostly yes. They're really quick, even with the cheap rates. I was totally surprised at first that I was getting next day service without expecting it. My brother used to work for them, so I always used to get my packages directly from him. He'd sign and give it to me later, saving me a lot of trouble (I was in school or at work in the daytime). I buy a lot of stuff from DigiKey, who publishes a Canadian catalog (and a very cool website) with duties and GST included in the prices. They use Purolator by default if you're in Canada. They handle the GST themselves. That is truly cool, for a company based in Thief River Falls, MN, USA. Stuff comes in record time, even with the cheap rates. On the other hand, they destroyed a VA Linux server on us (my company), that was enclosed in a custom shock-mounted case we had made for us (demo server). They paid us fully what we originally paid for it and gave us a formal apology. That's very cool, IMO.

Fedex: Never a problem. "Overnight" shipping takes 2 days, instead of one, when ordering from the States. I just paid CAN$200 for SuSE 7.3 in this situation... Damn duties. I am relatively happy, though. This probably has a lot to do with how impressed I am with 7.3 (released on FTP today, in case you were wondering why the mirror sites were slow as hell, and probably still are).

Canada Post: Believe it or not, I am happy with the service. They are much cheaper than anybody else, and I just today recieved a shipment from BC (I'm in Halifax) that was sent out yesterday. Bravo. Crown corporations *do* work.

That's just my experience. Some of you probably have different experiences. Maybe it's like hard drives, where everybody has *one* brand they refuse to buy, based on past experiences. (I have 2: Western Digital and Maxtor, ugh)

I use Digikey a lot

<ConspiracyTheory>
I choose instead to believe that some FBI agent talked to a buddy with the NSA, and they picked the PGP key for him, with the understanding that the "keyboard logger" cover story would be used.

Now that things have gone in the dumpster, there IS NO KEYBOARD LOGGER to disclosed the details of.
</ConspiracyTheory>

Besides, anyone with a DigiKey catalog and some time could build a VERY sweet keyboard logger, with remote dump via radio, etc. We should have a contest to see how few PIC chips it takes.

--Mike--