Starship Modeler Discussion Forums

With a poorly (or non) regulated DC power supply, you'll end up damaging or destroying the LED. Now's maybe a good time to introduce a few important facts about power supplies... When you have a regulated DC power supply, that means the supply contains extra circuitry to stabilize the supply's outp...

To get a little more complicated, now say you wanted multiple lights to feed from your 9v battery. You can have serial circuits and parallel circuits. In a serial circuit, you connect all the LEDs to each other where you have the negative post of one LED connecting to the positive post of the next ...

I would quite like to learn a bit more and build circuits myself, but you guys sure like your acronyms and jargon, making it pretty hard for the novice to get anywhere. If you have any specific questions about things that come up, ask them. You can PM me if you don't want to bother the group. To me...

Yo hey... So for my Zaku I've been doing more in Aves lately, rather than poly putty - and finding it a bit frustrating... For instance I made the shoulder part seen here by making a clay form, rolling Aves flat, and laying it on to get a more-or-less uniform thickness... So far so good. But what re...

You might want to get some good tweezers when working with them, small are they! Normally when I work with them I just use regular-size pliers - I wrap a rubber band around the handle so the pliers will hold tension on the part while I attach wires to it. (But, admittedly, I still do lose the littl...

These LEDs are a standard surface-mount size called 0603. You can get them from other sources a lot cheaper - about $0.70 each at Mouser, less if you buy them on Ebay from sellers in China. But, yeah, there's a lot you can do with these small LEDs. For instance, one of my unfinished projects is a 1:...

Christmas will soon be here. The day after, all of those great LED Christmas lights go on clearance. I got 50 light sets last year for five bucks each. I still have a few leftovers in my bin. "White" Christmas LEDs tend to be rather blue, though... Like first-generation white LEDs... And ...

By the way - can anybody tell me whether I could realistically be able to etch a board like this myself?? The traces on that board are 0.3mm to 0.35mm wide. Reasonably promising, then. The traces on my board are 0.2mm wide (8mil - the minimum as specified by batchpcb.com) so it might work. I think ...

Well, I discovered at least one problem with that board I designed: All the PIC's I/O lines sit on pull-up resistors (need pull-up resistors for I2C communication, and they seem like an easy way to both drive and current-limit the LEDs, too) - but one of the I/O lines is shared with the ICSP connect...

Is there a way to put a blinking LED in a circuit without causing a significant or noticeable drop in voltage across the board, short of using two power sources? You shouldn't be seeing a reduction in voltage unless you're overtaxing your power supply... Put the blinking LED, with current-limiting ...

So I'm planning to do a bunch of Armored Core models and I want to light them up - not only the eye lenses, but also thrusters and possibly other bits of detail as well. The plan is to use a microcontroller embedded inside the model to do PWM brightness control on the LEDs, and to accept commands vi...

I just got in ten (10) white Nano sized LEDs from www.Ngineering.com You know, I don't want to dump on Ngineering.com here, because I know everybody's got to do business the way that fits them - but those LED prices are nuts. A two-pack of 0402 LEDs for $6.75? That's expensive... The only factor th...

I2C will probably be a good choice in that there are many different processors that communicate via it while the Dallas/Maxim one-wire protocol is somewhat proprietary. I may have to think about whether I can manage a fifth line through that knee joint, then... I do like the general design of I2C, ...

Well, for what I'm doing I don't need a high data rate - really the premium is on minimizing the number of lines needed to carry power and data. This is why I initially thought of using DCC (unlike Dallas 1-wire, you can do DCC with just two lines for power and data and easily put out enough power t...

The KitsRUs programmer I use doesn't support debugging - and I guess there is the question of how well it'll be supported in the future. But I think it's also cheaper... And for me the fact that their protocol is published is a big advantage, 'cause I was able to use that published protocol to write...

Tetsujin, I know there's a sticky thread for microcontroller projects. Are there any links to references that you could post to that thread? A sort of "how-to," or "how to get started?" About all I know is that I'd need an interface board and software for programming the PIC, an...

Depends on how you define "simple", I guess... Having a dirt-cheap 8-pin analog IC with external capacitors and resistors driving a total of one blinker is "stone knives and bearskins" simple... Having an almost equally cheap 8-pin digital IC which requires no additional external...

You know you could buy five of those PICs separately for less than the cost of the magazine, right? Tetsujin, I had no idea the PICs were that cheap. The ones I've seen are, I already packaged on a board with extra components, and seem to run $30-40. Does Madman Lighting use PICs? I've been trying ...

You know you could buy five of those PICs separately for less than the cost of the magazine, right? I don't know if the chip could be extracted and reprogrammed - it's possible... but bear in mind that it is possible to code-protect PICs such that they can't be reprogrammed - if it works it could be...

Hiya, at some point in the future I want to do stop-motion with my models... As part of that I want the models themselves to have computer-controllable lights so I can automate certain tasks of controlling the lights... So basically I'm looking at my options for interfacing the PC to all those micro...

macfrank wrote:After programming, the SPI interface can be used as an SPI interface or regular I/O pins.

How do you switch between the two uses for those pins?

What kind of interface do you use to program an AVR anyway? I mean, I'm sure there's a parallel port solution (there always is - but they rarely work in my experience), but what are the good options for a hobbyist who wants a reliable hardware interface for writing program code to their controller?...

jwrjr wrote:Actually you can do indirect addressing in a PIC. You load the address into the FSR register, then do a memory access (read/write) to location 00h.

Yeah, I actually mentioned this, just didn't remember the name of the FSR register off hand. :D

What about the PIC24F line?

For assembly language, the Atmel AVR series is far easier to understand than the arcane PIC architecture and assembly language. For higher level languages, it doesn't matter as much. <shrug> The PIC architecture isn't so weird, though it does have its limits (at least in the older PICs like the 16F...

MillenniumFalsehood wrote:Here's what I'm looking for:

Cheap(like less than $8-10 per chip)

Easy programming language

Define "easy"... I think PIC assembly is pretty easy... I'm guessing you're maybe thinking C or Basic?

That's pretty cool. I've been thinking of doing something similar - using TTL-level RS-232 as an interface to control lighting modules inside models... I am a bit curious, however - why did you wind up needing bidirectional comms? It seems like all the control unit has to do is send commands to the ...

If the data I found was correct and I didn´t make too many mistakes, The station needs about 40 Seconds per turn. But don't forget, different parts of the station have different elevation relative to the central axis - so the station's gravity is a bit of a compromise - lesser closer to the central...

belkin321 wrote:Thanks Pat and Tetsujin. Tetsujin, where in a chaser circuit would the resistor and capacitor be placed. Thanks again for any help.

That's the part I don't know. :D I'm really a lot better with programs than I am with analog circuits...

I would think that could be accomplished by using a progammable microcontroller such as a PIC. I don't pretend to even have an idea of how to pull it off. I've only dabled. But there's a bunch of people here who use them on a regular basis. Basically depends on how you handle the timing in your pro...

Try a search for "BCD decimal" on Mouser. Looks to be several options.

Seems like BCD-to-decimal decoders are fairly common in the current "Nixie clock" fad, too - so you might find some info there.