When I was shopping for some goodies at All Electronics I came across a circuit card they were selling for $1. Description indicated that the board included two voltage regulators, a crystal and assorted parts. I like to scrounge and look up the parts used in consumer electronics so I purchased one of these just to scrounge. It’s like a grab bag of parts that engineers really use…

In this short article I provide some high resolution pictures of the board using the PCB scanning method described in this previous article. I remove parts using the scrounging methods described here, and I list the parts, with data sheet links, which I thought were worth removing.

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My father bought a wind generator and we erected it Sunday afternoon. He is a HAM radio guy and RF engineer so he had a antenna tower that was perfect for the wind generator. This generator is made by Sunforce and can output 400 Watts in a strong wind and cost about $600 at Amazon. Come see some pictures or the generator going up on a tower.

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Erin, AKA RobotGrrl needs our help to raise money for the Stanford EPGY AI summer program. Erin is a very talented high school student that will someday be a famous robotics engineer. She represents the new breed of passionate electronics engineers that will take us kicking and screaming into the future. Her efforts so far have gotten her accepted to the Stanford EPGY AI summer program but it will cost her a significant sum of money. Visit her site and donate or purchase one of her Styrobots to help get her though this summer program.

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We have four winners in this contest. To support the electronics hobby community uCHobby has a give away program where hobbyist receive interesting electronics parts and kits in exchange for links, articles and by winning comment contest at the site. This giveaway contest was for comments on the Wright Hobbies prototyping boards Six Prototyping Boards from Wright Hobbies. The winners for previous comment contest on the sponsorship announcement article were announced here.

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Florin shows us how to convert a Nokia 1110 cell phone’s normal monochrome LCD to a color LCD scrounged from a Nokia 1600. This article does not have much to do with microcontrollers or electronics hobby work but it is interesting and shows that you can hack your cell phones to make them suit your taste. This is very much in the Maker spirit.

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Every wonder what is inside a toll way RFID tag? The windshield on one of our cars had to be replaced the other day. We removed the toll way RFID tag before taking the car to the shop so I could peek inside. I doctored the picture here so the registration number is not shown.

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In a previous article we introduced the first uCHobby designed kit. The SBBPWR1 is a handy power supply module which plugs directly into a solderless breadboard. The previous article detailed the the overall design process for this kit. The SBBPWR1 has been received well and we got several good suggestions for improvements.

This article describes the improvements for the second revision of the kit. The new version is called SBBPWR2.

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We have two current contest at uCHobby, both are related to the package of 6 prototyping boards from Wright Hobbies. Read more about these contest in the sponsor announcement and the prototyping board review articles.

An ending date was not specified but I think now is a good time to announce some of the winners for the first comment contest.

Wright Hobbies Sponsor Announcement Comment Contest:
Two packs of 6 prototyping boards as reviewed in this article were to be given. One for the best comment and one selected randomly from all valid comments. There have been 23 comments so far with a clear winner for best comment.

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I won a Digital Multimeter Pen from Saelig which has some interesting features. Of course it is very handy to have the display in your hand as you measure. I find that positioning the meter to read it while probing is often a pain. This solves that problem. The meter even has a display on both sides so it works for left and right handed people.

Another neat feature is a build in logic probe. A reference high signal is connected to a jack on the meter side. This voltage is used to threshold the signal at the probe tip. So you can connect the reference pin to your logic supply and it automatically adjust the thresholds. If the measured voltage is less then 20% of the reference, the "low" LED is on, if above %80 of the reference, the "high" LED is on, otherwise no LED is active.

Saelig is an online store that specializes in neat electronics devices that would be of interest to electronic hobbyist and engineers. They send out an advertising flyer with specials and new products. I won the meter in a comment contest they had with one of these flyers. I do not see the Pen Multimeter at their online store so it maybe a contest only item. Saelig is not a sponsor of uCHobby but it would be great if they wanted to trade advertising space for giveaways. Maybe they will read this, we can hope…

In this article Steven Moughan shows us how to setup for PIC microcontroller development on Linux. Steve writes the following…

PICs are great, they really are… they have great features, decent instruction sets,
there’s lots to choose from, their manufacturer released a great IDE (MPlab) what could go wrong? Unfortunately the PIC is somewhat lacking when it comes to development software for Linux, and by this I mean IDEs and compilers. Here I will be dealing with getting your very own uC lab set up using Ubuntu Linux and some freely available tools.

By the end of this article we are going to have the following…

1. An IDE to develop in (PIKlab).
2. A C compiler to develop with (Hi-Tech C Lite)
3. A PIC simulator and some utilities to help debugging (GPsim and GPutils)

This article was submitted by Steven Moughan as part of the “Hobby parts for articles” program.

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