Mothballing the site for now since I haven't touched it in a year an a half. Thanks for dropping by everyone!

Finished up the MAX1811 demo board, go look at the pretty pictures.
Updated the ATiny25 page as well: described how to use a crystal oscillator with the chip.

The WRT54GL serial adapter board is pretty much complete at this point.
This update focuses primarly on the DE-9 connector. Despite some bugs the initial version does what I need so I probably won't ever make another revision.

Your eyes do not deceive you!
Two updates in one month within thirty days!
As part of my never ending quest for a Better Battery Charger, I put together a simple board for the MAX1811 Lithium Ion charger IC.

Built up and (partly) tested the WRT54GL Serial Port Breakout Board.

Necessity is the mother of invention.
Behold: The WRT54GL Serial Port Breakout Board.

Make things BLINK.

What the heck? It's the end of May? How did that happen?
Oh well; have a project: Time Pulse
It's a one-off 'cobbled together in an afternoon' project, but may be interesting none-the-less.

Took some photos for the PIR Camera Rig. Enjoy.
Also posted the start of a new project: Yet Another Fucking Arduino Clone.

1. bins
2. bins
3. bins
4. bins
5. bins
6. cap from Orange Slice soda bottle
7. bins
8. bins
9. bins
10. catalog
11. fish knife

I've been slowly filling out the camera rig page. Photos still incoming.

I was in a traffic collision.
It's amazing how, in less than a second, everything can go to hell.

Anyway.
Between that and work I haven't had time to do anything, really.
I threw together a quick page detailing my exploits with a passive IR sensor and a camera rigged to take photos in the infrared spectrum.
Hopefully I'll get more stuff up in February.

The super-secret contract I was working on was a a GPS signal to IRIG-B time signal converter. Reading the time from NMEA sentiences sentences and generating a signal seems pretty straight forward, but syncing that IRIG signal with the in-air GPS signal, plus or minus a millisecond? Whole other can of worms. Can't do that with a microcontroller and a cheap commercial GPS module.
I have a project involving a point-and-shoot camera, an infrared floodlight, and a hacked passive infrared motion sensor wall switch (hopefully) but it's taking a while - don't expect that soon.
In other news I recently landed full time employment - a line like that is usually a death-knell of a blog/website. Time will tell if it's true here.

But now, allow me to whine.
Inspired by Adafruits pager scanner project I recently purchased a pager on impulse:

(For the benefit of search engine spiders, model number is A06CXB5806BA, FCC ID is LX696FT4002.)

It's a (pristine, there isn't even dust in the cracks) Motorola PF1500 (user manual), although you wouldn't know that by looking at it as SkyTel apparently replaced the consumer-level model number identifier with their own sticker. (I spent an hour downloading all the Motorola pager user manuals I could find and comparing the product images to what I had.) The manual (or at least the copy I had) was copyrighted in 1999. An old price sheet I dug up listed the MSRP as $212. It's uses Motorola's ReFLEX (which makes me think of heartburn for some reason) two-way paging protocol (this thing must have been FUCKING AWESOME back in '99), and apparently ran for weeks on a single double-A cell. It's compact, well built, and has a nice heft to it.
Unfortunately it's far more complex than Limor's pager, I can't find any any datasheet for any part, an FCC OET Equipment Authorization Number search returns two hits both of which have "no attachments for public review", and I don't have access to a logic analyzer epic enough to do any effective reverse engineering.
And this is what I wanted to whine about. This pager is completely. Fucking. Useless. I've got a whole box of telecom equipment - cell phones, pagers, SIM cards and whatnot - that are also useless. Thousands of dollars (when new) of equipment tossed aside, hundreds of thousands of human-hours of engineering and R&D and sheer sweat spent of building these devices, and who knows how much and how many resources spent to provide these things that are collecting dust on my shelf because they are part of a completely closed ecosystem. The datasheets and service manuals are confidential, the protocols are locked down technically and legally. It's frustrating as hell to have a whole box of perfectly good equipment that I can't use at all.

I'm working on a contract that I can't talk about; at least not yet.
But! I did complete this in the meantime: an LED matrix display driven by an ATMega48.

I declare the Ultradock project finished. Did you know that boards for the project are for sale? 'Cause they are. FYI.
Also a new project has been posted, wherein I build an adapter to connect an Microsoft Xbox 360 hard disk drive to standard SATA port.
The battery info page has also been updated.

The Ultradock project has been updated. Worked out a few bugs, and I'm happy with the layout. I'm actually going to start selling bare boards soon. The hold up right now is various permits and whatnot from the my regional government (ugh) and actually putting the boards into mass production. Watch this space.

So many unfinished projects, so little time.
I finally, finally have my notes on batteries posted. This has been sitting on my hardrive for over a month and it still isn't finished. Also, the SD Card page has been updated. Those things are turning out to be a lot more complex than I expected.

Updates!
Probably the final update (for now) on the EV Warthog. Also did some work on the Ultradock recently.

It's no weaponized motorized shopping cart, but this'll scare the cats well enough.

I'm back.
You know it's time to update your webpage when you've had enough time since your last update to conceptualize, design, layout, order parts for, fab boards for, and assemble an entire project.
I built an all-in-one dock for recent-gen iPods and iPhones - check it out.

I'm in the process of moving. The Lab isn't unpacked yet sadly.
Lots of little fixes, mostly pin sizes - I discovered after I had sent a bunch of boards in to be manufactured that my default drill size for pin holes was waaaay too small.
Propeller Chip Development board and DDR2 SMBus Breakout have been updated.
Footprint generator now supports decimal inches as a measurement unit.

Lots'a stuff today!
Got a fabbed DDR2 breakout board back from BatchPCB recently. It had some mistakes but can be used for testing.
Developed a rectangular footprint generator for gEDA PCB, check it out.
Finally, I just finished up a development board for the Parallax Propeller chip; check it out here.

Did a part fit check, fixed a couple of mistakes, everything else looks good, so I'm sending it to get fabbed.
Files have been updated with the fixes - click here to check it out.

Pretty much just me tinkering with things.

New project is up. Simple project to breakout the SMBus pins on the DDR2 slot found on many common mainboards.

Started the page that will (hopefully) be a quick reference for the Secure Digital (SD) card format and a basic how-to on the interface: check it out

And we're live.