Clean, Simple, Cheap Toner Transfer

Made this movie about toner transfer using photo paper. It was demonstrated as messy and inconvenient before using high-gloss paper, Check out satin-matte.. There's no soap-water scrubbing action, and it gives an accurate transfer.

Toner Transfer Made Easy: Professional Circuit Boards At Home - Watch the top videos of the week here

As you can see the outcome is perfect. The quality approaches that of commercial transfer films.

I've made two JDM programmer pcbs with the method and they turned out perfect, here's one:

A 2051 thermometer experiment

Well this was mostly a "notice some unused components lying around and build something on impulse kind of thing"
Still have some 2051s left over from a previous order of around 5. Had a green, 4digit, 7segment led display which was of the dumb variety with each segment having separate pins in all the digits, no easy solution with 1 set of segment pins and a latch selector like here Also had two 8bit serial-in paralell-out shift registers so I used those to drive the last two of the four digits and wired up the middle segment of the second digit to a separate IO pin to use as a negative sign when it's freezing For the temperature reading I use a DS1621 which I freesampled from Dallas/Maxim The thing top left is a 7805 and under the micro is a reset switch.


It looks really ghetto indeed but It works, and something like getting the more accurate value from the 1621 and sending it out on the serial port for temperature monitoring on a PC or controlling a fan with it wouldn't take long and would only be about 5 extra lines in BASCOM.

The code was based on the project linked above. It's here in case you're interested.

Oct-Nov-Dec Hardware projects summary

It's been an interesting two months in regards of hardware projects. I familiarised myself with the antique AT89C2051 and BASCOM, I really like the simplicity. While this micro may be old, I find it fun to work with. This was the one microcontroller that I built 5 programmers for, none of which worked. My latest try, an old version of Peter Averill's TAFE programmer did the trick however so now I am fully capable of programming them. Good thing too because I have about 5 lying around doing nothing. After finishing a 4 year old project I never managed to finish because of the lack of a programmer I built a POV device with ported and improved code from a POV example.

I later found out that that particular type of SMD led had an integrated resistor so adding the resistors was really pointless. (Not sure now..)

The code in BASCOM-8051, It's currently displaying my name, alter as needed.

The project I finished was actually linked to the previous article. It's the PS/2->Newton Serial Keyboard converter from here.

Works as expected with the improved version of the code. The Linux driver also works after significant modifications

(I haven't updated the link in the previous post yet but I doubt anyone wants it and i'm lazy so leave a comment if you want the working version)

Onward, I've just finished duplicating a significant project that can be found here. It's the AVR Signal Generator, mostly because I had a 2x16character LCD lying around doing absolutely nothing. I haven't finished it yet but. I can now verify that it's working properly.

I've also revamped the MIDI keyboard driver I've built quite some time ago. The project is from this site. The PCB was badly damaged due to overheating, bad PCB quality and a use of a chemical soldering liquid which made additional soldering to the board borderline impossible(thus the overheating) However now it is completely functional again.

ZipIt NFS Jukebox files

Here it is. New file, should fix problems. (I hope this is GPL compliant, edited portions of code are supplied in the archive.)
Okay so, this SHOULD work on ANY ZipIt with a linux image that has the ZipIt audio drivers(wm8751l.o,ep7212_audiodma.o,zipitaudio.o) and can mount NFS as everything besides playmp3 is static linked and I included working libs for playmp3.
Just unpack the file to the root of an NFS share and mount that to /mnt on the zipit (mount -t nfs -o nolock,tcp,intr ip:shared_dir /mnt)
then type
/mnt/p
and relief should start up. Put your mp3s and FLACs on that NFS share and you're good to go :)

Notes:
ffmpeg suffers from a reported bug with FLAC files that hasn't been fixed yet. for me this meant that it couldn't play 1 file from about 30. YMMV, until it's fixed recoding with a different version of flac should help.

if flac files don't play(like.. at all) you probably don't have write access to /dev, just delete /dev/mouse if you have one then cp /dev/null /dev/mouse, plus delete /dev/dsp and mknod /dev/dsp c 245 4 manually and it should work.

if flacs play and mp3s don't and you don't have /dev/zipaudio replace /dev/zipaudio with /dev/dsp in /mnt/players/mp3play (with any text editor)

I modified playmp3 to load stuff from /mnt (/lib/ld-linux.so.2 -> /mnt/ld-linux.so and libc.so.6 -> /mnt/c.so) so if you want to integrate playmp3 into your mmc filesystem or anything get the original version from a few entries back (Zipit Modding entry, too lazy to link) and place the .so files (renamed to their original filenames) into your lib dir.

When in the file browser don't press enter on files, press a to add a file or shift+a to add all supported files in the directory.

Kill the battery monitor loop, I don't have it in my mmc init scripts and I just noticed when I tried without an mmc card that it produces skips whenever it refreshes. if you have it running do kill -STOP [pid of loop_batlvl] and kill [pid of sleep 60] before running relief

Good luck :)