November 11, 2006 @ 11:36 pm
I needed a device to test R/C servos. Hooking up receiver, battery, servos and then running the transmitter with the antenna extended inside the house was awkward. I thought this could be a nice little project for some microcontroller. After a long abstinence from PIC assembler, I downloaded the latest MPLAB release and programmed away. Here it is, the first cut of my servo tester.
(more…)
October 28, 2006 @ 8:25 pm
During the summer of 1998 I built yet another PIC based clock. I had an old LED analog clock kicking around. It was a CMOS logic design built from an ELV (a German electronics magazine) kit. The clock lost its time every single time there was the slightest brownout, it bothered me to no end. So I set out to reuse some of the parts and built a PIC based replacment. The most significant item on the feature list was a low power time keeping mode to keep the time ticking but the display dark during AC power loss. What can I say, it actually worked! The clock was able to keep time for several minutes running on just a larger capacitor (where the schematic says ‘battery’).
(more…)