Day 2 of District 3’s Biohealth Innovation Week (which I covered in some depth yesterday) was the main reason I registered, and it did not disappoint. There were three main events scheduled, and I attended each: Product Development for Biomed and Biotech; Regulatory process and Quality Management in Biomed and Biotech sectors; and Emerging Technology…

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Though most of my projects wind up with their own regulators on-board, the breadboard is the go-to of choice when it’s time to just try something out.  Since pretty much everything I play with needs juice, this will be a little review of some of the options I’ve used, and what I’ve learned in doing…

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Kicad is an cross-platform, open source, electronics design suite.  I’d toyed with it in the past, but had never made it to actually designing real projects with it until recently.  Here, I’ll go over my experience and initial impressions, and provide a few pointers and resources for anyone curious about trying it out.  We’ll tour…

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I recently received a little adjustable power supply, purchased off ebay for dirt cheap.  It’s pretty nice, so if you’ve been considering something similar have a gander at the video: It can take between 4.5 and 23V in (recommended to stay below 20V) and has a 1.5V drop-out.  It’s claimed that it can source up…

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Received a Hantek DSO-2090 USB oscilloscope today and put it through a few paces.  Here are the results and my impressions from using the device a bit, as well as a few tips for working with it under Linux. The first thing to note is that, in terms of DSOs, this thing is dirt cheap…

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Just got my hands on RedBear Lab‘s Duo—what promises to be a great little BLE/WiFi combo—and got some preliminary testing done.  By the end of the seven straightforward steps detailed here, you’ll know all the basics about the Duo and have your own “Arduino” code running on the device, too.  Other than my own ramblings,…

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I’ve recently had to develop an application using the BLE Nano platform. The BLE Nano is a little module built around the Nordic nRF51822 SoC, along with a minimalist set of support components  including an on-board antenna for the bluetooth wireless connection.  The Nordic itself provides all the Bluetooth low energy functionality and hosts your…

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I love the Arduino platform, especially for prototyping, and have been playing with the Atmel ATmega chips for a long while.  Once you’ve designed your project, some of the smaller derivatives (like the Ardweeny I’ve mentioned before) are cheap enough to leave embedded everywhere and, in any case, you can always move from an Arduino…

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I loooove LEDs: they’re easy to use and really efficient.  I’ve always wanted to use light-emitting diodes to feed, or at least supplement, my plants because you can get a lot of lumen without using many Watts and also because you can target the frequencies usable by chlorophyll (in the red and blue parts of…

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A few months ago, I funded my first kickstarter project for production of the Digispark: a tiny (less than a square inch) Arduino-compatible device based on the AVR ATtiny85. Plugged-in Digispark Though I received the occasional progress update email, I pretty much forgot about the Digispark. Until last week, that is, when I received a…

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