This was one of those projects that should have taken an afternoon and ended up as a reasonably large build, however it’s now complete and working rather nicely. It’s also a perfect of example how I sometimes create a piece of test equipment for use with another project I’m working on. In this case I…

So, over the last few evenings I’ve managed to finish the first useful board for my new extendable PSU; a 5v board that can supply around 3 amps. It has a trim control that allows the output to be adjusted from 5v to 6v, and two op-amps wired as voltage comparators that illuminate a couple of…

I’m currently working on a +5v plug-in module for my new PSU (see previous blog post).I had several requirements for this module including the ability to withstand a dead-short circuit and the final output voltage to be trimable to +/- 0.5v. Because of this I decided not to use the existing +5v rail that’s already…

Yesterday evening I completed the first of the plug in modules that simply allows me switch the thing on and off, monitor the output voltages and fault conditions. This is as basic a module as you can have, consisting of only LEDs and resistors. Later, I will create a better monitoring card that can actually monitor…

The long bank holiday weekend arrived and I decided I would complete a battery powered project that’s been sitting around for a while; I have a lot of half completed projects sitting around the workshop.I needed to calibrate the software that monitors the internal rechargeable batteries and realised I didn’t have any type of suitable data…

When I started PIC programming 15+ years ago hobbyists used to build their own PIC programmers and as such, came out with their own ICSP (In-Circuit-Software-Programming) interface connection pin-outs which they would adopt for their own designs. I don’t remember giving my own pin-out much thought and it was probably based on the easiest way…