LEDs have a well-deserved reputation for high-efficiency operation, not to mention high reliability. Properly specified and implemented, LEDs should and do satisfy virtually every lighting application. Still, there are times when actual device lifetimes fall short of the specified ideal. LEDs are wide-bandgap semiconductor devices. As a result, they have far more complex and varied failure modes than the incumbent technologies. Unlike an incandescent lamp, where failure is fairly simple (the bulb produces light until the filament breaks), with an LED, the failure modes range from mechanical and electrical to material.
Put a voltage meter anywhere with this very handy display. These are often used by RC hobbyists for keeping track of batteries but we thought it would be great on a breadboard or enclosure.
Simply connect the red wire to the positive supply, and black to negative ground. The display has a microcontroller that will read the voltage, compare it to a stable reference and display the voltage with 0.1V precision on a 3-digit 7-segment display. It works from 3.2V up to 30V so it will be good for nearly any electronic project! The meter draws 3-4mA to power the microcontroller and display. This particular LED display is a nice vivid green, which we found very readable. Mounting tabs make this module easy to attach to any box or plate.
PIC microcontrollers’ Sleep feature will minimize power consumption in battery-powered applications. This experimental tutorial from Embedded Lab describes how to put a PIC microcontroller into Sleep mode and then compares the PIC current consumption during Sleep mode and the normal operation mode.
I’ve been working on a rather large project for some time now and while my new h20 shield is just one piece of the larger project, I thought it deserved it’s own post and documentation. I can see this shield being quite useful for lots of folks wishing to control water using one of the fairly inexpensive Orbit 62035 garden hose valves.
How small AVR USB programmer can be? No doubt it has to use single chip capable to support USB and SPI programming. simpleavr have chosen to use Attiny45 microcontroller and adapted well known vusb port from
He even decided to reject crystal oscillator, and instead used AVR internal 16.5Mhz clock source. So this way vusbtiny programmer became wery low component count and still able to program AVRs through AVRDude and power target boards.
