Reverse engineering is one of the most challenging and rewarding endeavors in electronics. I’m talking about replicating the functionality of a device that you’ve seen or read about but that’s too expensive or otherwise unavailable. There are numerous issues involved in reverse engineering — from creating a schematic to locating parts. Moreover, you have to understand what’s going on, both mechanically and electronically. In my experience, seemingly simple devices are often the most challenging. However, there are methods you can use to glean an understanding of just about any device on the market.
Joe Pardue gives us a tutorial that describes how to build and use the Simple Chaser Lights Kit. You can purchase the kit from smileymicros.com and nutvolts.com.
Digilent is proud to announce the 8th annual US regional Digilent Design Contest, to be held on May 6-7, 2012 in conjunction with the IEEE EIT conference in Indianapolis.
Believe it or not, Daniel Kramnik is only a Junior in High School and has built this Digital Salinometer for a Water Quality Science Olympiad event. The Digital Salinometer built by Daniel took almost 2 weeks and is capable of accuracy within 0.0014%. Daniel's entry ended up winning him first place at the regionals and he's now headed for the State competition in March. Amazing what high school kids can do these days!
You can now upgrade your 16-Bit Micro Experimenter to a powerful Digital Signal Processor (DSP) by just simply changing out the PIC24F microcontroller to a 40 MIPS dsPIC; the 28 pin PIC33F J128GP802, and then adding the appropriate DSP software.
