Still alive!

Hey there! Just checking in to make sure that I haven’t abandoned this blog/journal/whatever on my progress into the world of electronics. I have been making great strides indeed, it’s just that documenting that work is quite laborious.

Anyway, there are numerous things that I’m working on simultaneously. I will be getting a fresh new batch of components and tools in the next few weeks (already got them! 🙂 ) so I am looking forward to getting started on actual projects, instead of just tinkering around (although that has been greatly entertaining).

Some of the things that I will be working on are:

[Done!] A clock with a 7-segment led display whose time accuracy will be controlled by the real time clock (also known as a RTC) DS1307.

I already have the RTC DS1337 that I previously purchased, however it is quite different from what I expected. It doesn’t seem to have an easy battery backup like the DS1307, and there really isn’t much hacker community support for it in the way of libraries and tutorials.

Now I could buy a premade module for about $10-15 which would just “plug and play”, but the module is only made up a few passive components – besides the RTC -, and shouldnt be hard at all to make myself. (It wasn’t.)

[Done!] Controlling a 7-segment LED display with a display driver. More specifically, the MAX7219 display driver. I figure it would be a lot easier to get this thing up and running rathar then deal with the hastle of using multiple shift-registers and a whole lot of resistors just to control a 4 or so digit LED display. (And it was, honestly, this thing is like a god send for controlling 7-segment and matrix LED display.)

[Done!] Programming an ATtiny, to start with, and later an ATmega. This is so that I can get away from being dependent on the Arduino being hooked up to my projects all the time, and would reduce the size of my projects as all I would need is the ATmega/tiny, a crystal, a couple of capacitors and something to regulate voltage.

[Done!] Modifying a servo to rotate continuously. This is absolutely necessary for my main project, and there are more then a couple of guides/tutorials online that detail how to do it. (It was ridiculously easy to do this, took no more than 5 minutes start to finish.)

Update (6/Oct/2012): So I started writing this a while back, maybe a month or so, and have accomplished a lot of the things that I had planned. As such, I updated this post and am submitting it now. The detailed posts accompanying each project should be up soon – but knowing my post history I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them.