Here’s my schematic and board design for a simple low side switch using a N channel mosfet. It’s a simple circuit that has a input for positive and negative and an output for positive and negative connections. Pretty self explanatory. It seems like every time I go to work with mosfets I have to spend a good 5-10 minutes reminding myself how they work. So here’s a reminder to myself for the next time I go looking and maybe it’ll help somebody else out.
Category: Tutorials
P Channel Mosfet – High Side Switch
Here’s my schematic and board design for a simple high side switch using a P channel mosfet. It’s a simple circuit that has a input for positive and negative and an output for positive and negative connections. Pretty self explanatory. It seems like every time I go to work with mosfets I have to spend a good 5-10 minutes reminding myself how they work. So here’s a reminder to myself for the next time I go looking.
Storing GPS Location in Photo Pixels
A few years ago I was working on a project using a multi-rotor UAS to monitor weather. While out in the field, the user needed to be able to see the location of the UAS on a satellite map. The UAS had a GPS and was capable of transmitting that back to the laptop running custom ground station software; however, a constant connection to the internet would be necessary to get satellite maps from Google and many places this would be used won’t have a reliable signal. So I rolled my own solution to fetch the map from Google ahead of time and save it as an image file, which works fine since the location would be known in advance. The challenge was that I needed to have GPS coordinates associated with the image. Instead of having the GPS coordinates in a separate file, I decided to alter the pixels in the image to store the GPS coordinates so that only one file was necessary.
Reflectance Sensor Array with RPR-220
I’m working on a robot project and one of the intended uses is to teach line following to college students. For this, I’m making an array of 9 RPR-220 reflectance sensors. This post will describe the part I’ve designed and the reasoning behind it. It’s a bit rambly so consider yourself forewarned.
How I Migrated from Aperture to Lightroom
I got started in photography in 2005 on my first trip out of the country and used iPhoto to organize photos until about 2011 when I upgraded to Aperture. About a year ago, Apple decided to stop updating Aperture. On one hand, this is pretty frustrating because I loved Aperture and now it will quickly grow old. But on the other hand, it had been getting a little long in the tooth and this is a good excuse to move over to Lightroom. Starting in 2014 I started using Lightroom for all new projects but I’ve only recently begun migrating past projects over to Lightroom. Here’s how I did it.
Continue reading “How I Migrated from Aperture to Lightroom”
Photo Edits – Before & After 5
In this episode of Photo Edits – Before and After, I’ll walk you through the large and small edits necessary to turn this photo from meh to WOW. This is one of those cases that occurs from time to time where the photo you take just doesn’t even come close to what you saw with you eyes and you have to alter it considerably in post.
Simple LiPo Battery Charger with the MCP73831
The little board was built to charge a single lipo battery using the MCP73831 from Microchip. I plan to use it along with several other boards featured on this blog in a larger project, but I like to break things up and make sure they’re working individually before making them work together. Continue reading “Simple LiPo Battery Charger with the MCP73831”
Simple Boost / Step-up DC-DC Converter Using the NCP1402
If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ll have noticed that something I like to do is test ideas on simple breakout boards before implementing them into larger projects. If something goes wrong, I haven’t wasted a bunch of time/money on it. And if something goes right, then I’ve got an example that I can keep around which will help next time I need to implement that particular part. This post shows my breakout of the NCP1402 boost converter that takes inputs from 1-4V and outputs 5V at up to 200mA.
Continue reading “Simple Boost / Step-up DC-DC Converter Using the NCP1402”
Perfectly Clear Ice Spheres
I’ve become obsessed recently with getting perfectly clear ice for my drinks. Here are my experiences getting almost perfectly clear ice spheres. The beginning of this post will talk about how to get clear ice, then how I progressed through cubes, and eventually how to get clear ice spheres every time. If you just want my unique method, feel free to jump down to the bottom. Continue reading “Perfectly Clear Ice Spheres”
TB6612FNG Motor Driver Breakout Board
Part of a robot controller I’m currently working on involves using some motor controllers. Since this robot controller is expensive and I’ve never worked with h-bridges (other than in professional products) I decided to make a breakout board to test it rather than risk making a stupid mistake on the robot controller. Luckily, it all worked perfectly so I’m sharing it with the world so that other people can learn from it. Continue reading “TB6612FNG Motor Driver Breakout Board”
The Wandering Engineer 