ASquare bought an Arduino starter pack before christmas and has wasted no time becoming a hardware-hacking geek.
Not only is his new blog totally awesome but he’s also got an impressive initial project!

RGB button pad demo from JMG on Vimeo.

The monome is a gorgeous, minimalist, open-source light-and-button pad used primarily by musicians as a controller. The folks over at SparkFun Electronics, inspired by the monome, released their own button pads and circuit boards, only they designed theirs to be able to hold RGB LEDs. They made this nifty Tetris game with their parts. Looking at it, though, I noticed something: they only seemed to use a limited palette, in particular, they only appeared to have red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white, corresponding to channels being fully on or fully off. I wanted to see if I could get colour mixing, wherein channels were on partially in order to blend colours smoothly.

not sure you’re up to all this? you can always buy Monome kits direct from the ethereal source!

Voltage is the name of Todd Bailey’s band. This tutorial is not about that, however. It is about how to use your multimeter!

Part 3 of this exciting series sees our protagonist in AC/DC land taking care of three common tasks:

Testing batteries!

Measuring wall supplies!

Checking out wall-sockets!

Want to learn more? Click here!

I installed Arduino IDE 009 since I figured I should learn this stuff if I’m going to sell Arduino’s (and clones)

My project today was to build a simple NPN Hfe (Beta) meter to do some tests on the now ultra-rare 2sc2291 matched pairs. My multimeter has one but I wanted to make sure I was testing with the same setup as the one in the datasheet, with a Vce of about 6V and Ic = 1mA. The results are in the x0xd0x wiki

This is the breadboard circuit I used:

its similar to the one described on the x0xb0x page, but with the op amp swapped around for NPN’s

The sketch is rather small, I just take the two analog measurements, do a bit of math and spit out the calculated beta. I checked this against my meter and it matched up for lower betas (although not for higher ones, which may mean I’ve got current leaking into the opamp)

Get your ohmmeters out, kids. It’s time for part 2 of how to use a multimeter, this time for all of your resistor-measuring needs.

You will Learn:

• How to measure resistors (duh)
• The difference between auto-ranging and ranged meters and what to watch out for
• How to characterize and test potentiometers and certain sensors.

I also attempt to uncover the reason why all meter ranges start with the number 2.

Click here to read the tutorial!

There’s lots of video clips, many of which are extremely boring compared to YouTube. Like check this one out of me shading an LDR

I strongly recommend adding it to your myspace!@

Since it seemed to be the hip thing to do, I ordered a set of prototype PCBs from Gold Phoenix. The quality is very nice (although I did pay for electrical test) and the turn around was speedy.

One of the projects I got back was Mystery Kit! Can you guess what Mystery Kit is? Shouldn’t be too hard…

Get to know your meter better, with a quick lesson on continuity!

Here’s a video from the page, cause I like embedding videos. I call this one BEEEEEP. I’m thinking of making it into a facebook plug-in!

If you design and hack electronics for fun or work, then you know that PCB costs can be a big part of your budget. There’s a lot of manufacturers there, and they all use different pricing schemes.
Argh! So hard to compare!
So I wrote a javascript PCB cost calculator. Just punch in your PCB size and the minimum number you need and it’ll give you an idea of how much it will cost to make (shipping is approximated)

See the screenshot below, then go and visit the Real Deal

Walter just got his USBtinyISP kit, built it and shot a video of him demonstrating a how to program a chip with a simple blinking-LED program.

There’s a lot more to read at his site so be sure to go there!

Mike adapted some green spokepov kits to make a first revision of a 3d LED bonsai tree! Read his blog to see details on how he made all three versions of this project including neat pics and videos.

AtomicSalad went out of control with his Digg Button hacking. Not only a clever removable programming interface! Not just new firmware! Also, a music video staring Angelina Jolie as The Digg Button. Look well, children, one day you will be studying this man’s work in History of Modern Film

Read all about it at instructables