Practical Electronics for Inventors

I had already purchased an earlier edition of this book a few years ago on my kindle (third edition). It was a great read however, I found the electronic format a little too clumsy for a reference book. You just can’t beat a dead tree version of a reference book sometimes. While I was casually browsing Amazon, I saw that Practical Electronics for Inventors was on special so I took the opportunity to purchase the physical copy and later edition....

October 3, 2021 · 2 min · Phil Howlett

Scamp: A self-contained Forth computer

I’ve been messing around with the forth programming language lately. Yes I could run something like gforth or other interpreter on the desktop but its more fun to play with real hardware. My current setup of running a version of flashforth hosted on an ATMega328 chip was just too brittle and clumsy. Then I read about the Scamp computer! So what is a Scamp computer? It is a self-contained forth computer running its own version of flashforth on a stick....

August 21, 2021 · 2 min · Phil Howlett

No Connection Symbol for Eagle

I have created a simple No Connection symbol for Eagle CadSoft. At the moment I have only 1 symbol/package included in this library and that is the ‘NO CONNECTION’ symbol. The intent is to add more things as I come across it. No connection symbol for Eagle It is quite simple to use, it simply places an ‘x’ on the schematic. There is no PCB footprint (as there isn’t one) so it is purely for visual aesthetics....

October 11, 2015 · 1 min · Phil Howlett

Beyond the Arduino

I’ve been playing around with the Arduino for a while now (offline to the blog) and while it is a great platform to get into the embedded arena (and electronics in general), I am yearning for something a little bit more, something beyond the Arduino. I haven’t done a blog post in a while (I had great plans on posting my experiments and circuits as I learned) but the time it takes to create a post on a simple circuit that I built during the learning iteration process just didn’t work....

June 28, 2015 · 1 min · Phil Howlett

Learning Fail

Learning to fail and how you move on from it: In my previous two posts I had designed and created a pcb layout for a simple 555 timer flasher. I thought it would be a simple thing to do because I really wanted to test the workflow on how to create a pcb from start to finish. 555 PCB with components After placing and soldering all the components on my pcb, and applying power to it, I expected to see some nice flashing lights just like my breadboard model was doing....

December 21, 2014 · 2 min · Phil Howlett