OK, I may have gone a bit mad after finding Seeed's Fusion PCB Service. Yet another new board!
This is a simple board, which adapts these 3.3v USB to serial boards to an xBee socket. If it works it should allow me to sell some cheap xBee Explorer style boards.
UPDATE: Dont use this board! The SSOP16 package i used to make the library had one row of pins in completely the wrong order (who the hell does this?!?!) Stay tuned for v1.5.
A new board!
This is a carrier board for the AS5035 magnetic quadrature encoder, it detects the rotation of a magnet above the center of the AS5035 IC, and outputs a quadrature signal.
Its untested at the moment, but i have 10 on the way, for use on R2. Once tested, i'll have 6 units for sale through gobotics.net
This is my review of the Duratool D00661 Soldering iron, sold in a kit by Farnell here for £30.38. First, the kit contents:
The Solder station contains the station itself, and the iron. The station has an integrated stand, which is easily removable by sliding the whole thing backwards. It also comes with a slide-out parts tray / sponge holder, in case you need to store any small parts while soldering.
The iron is a fairly typical unit, but comes with some handy features. First off, the rubberized grip area helps you keep a good grip on the iron, so should help avoid burns due to dropping the iron. The element is replaceable, so if you manage to burn it out you can get another for £1.64 without buying a whole new iron. The tips are changeable, with a wide variety of tips available including: 1mm Pointed, 0.5mm Pointed, 3mm Chisel, 2mm Flat, and 1mm Bevel; each of which cost only £1.11.
The solder station unit has controls for shifting the temperature up and down, and an on/off button. The dual-readout LCD shows both the current and target temperature, which is an incredibly handy feature for knowing when your iron is up to temperature. As far as i can tell, the target temperature can only be set in Celsius, so those of you who measure in Fahrenheit or Kelvin are out of luck! The station lets you adjust the temperature from 150 all the way up to 450 degrees, very handy for lead-free solder!
The iron takes under 30 seconds to get to temperature, and while in use, holds within 5 degrees of the target temperature. I have noticed that when not in use, the temperature tends to be slightly on the high side (+5-10 degrees) due to the bang-bang style of temperature control, but this will rectify itself once the iron is used. The iron comes pre-tinned, but i would suggest using tinning compound to make sure the tip stays in tip-top condition.
So, we come to the actual usage of the iron. I found it works very well for the cost, almost as well as some £100 irons i have used, and far better than any other £30 irons. I used the included 1.0mm tip to do some SMD soldering on a new R2 board, and very good results.
In summation, this is a good iron for anyone wishing to do hobbyist work, and will work well all the way down to tiny SMD equipment. I would definitely recommend it to anyone in the market for an iron. Its not just good for the price, its good!
Found these the other day, may be handy for anyone doing something they want GPS assisted. I'm considering the em-411 for the quadcopter's GPS assist (as its the only self contained unit).
http://www.globalsat.com.tw/manual.php?menu=3
Tonight i spent some time at HAC:Manchester reverse engineering the keyboard matrix on our speak and spell, in preparation for hooking it up to an MBED. Since nobody else has released this information (as far as i can tell), here is the pinout:
| pin | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | u | k | off | a | f | ? | p | z |
| 2 | v | l | go | b | g | & | q | ` |
| 11 | w | m | <- | c | h | ??? | r | # |
| 12 | x | n | " | d | i | :) | s | / |
| 13 | y | o | _ | e | j | on | t | return |
This means that when the 'off' button is pressed, for example, pin 1 and pin 5 will be connected together.
To read a matrix keyboard like this, we write some code that steps through the 'down' set of pins (1, 2, 11, 12, 13), holding them low one at a time, then checks each of the other pins (3-10) to see if anything is being held low. If so, we perform a lookup on the table above.
Code to follow next week!