Etching Tutorial take 2 Posted at: Thu, Jul 1st, 2010 | 11:07AM UTC By Josh Ashby

My first etching tutorial was both my first tutorial, and also a tutorial in a subject that was fairly new to me at the time. In other words, it sucked. Big time.

This time I’m going to try to do it right, and have photos to prove it, So lets get started. Today I’m going to teach you, or make a feeble attempt at teaching, how to etch a board, from start to finish.

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Even more updates Posted at: Tue, Jun 29th, 2010 | 6:16PM UTC By Josh Ashby

A few items of update. First off, TI has launched a new product, the MSP430 Launchpad.

The Launchpad is a $4.30 with free shipping dev board for TI’s MSP430 chip family. On the board there is USB which supplies power, and acts as the debugging emulator and the programmer for the chip, and then a nice 20 pin DIP socket for the MSP430 chips. The board breaks out all of the pins for the chip, and also has a spot for an external crystal. After a very frustrating, and long cursing at TI’s servers spurt, which lasted a good day as the Launchpad was so popular I finally got around to placing my order, however the backorder for the Board looks like I will have it around the end of July, start of August sadly. Hopefully I can find, and build a dev environment for the MSP430 on linux, seeing as there is a GCC port for it already all that is left is integrating it with Code::Blocks, and finding a way to upload the code to the MSP430.

Other goodies that I have received include Read more…

Drill press Posted at: Sun, Mar 7th, 2010 | 9:42PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Having completed etching my Quad Low-side motor controller board, I needed to drill out the holes, the only problem: I don’t have a drill press, and the nearest readily available one is at my grandparents house two towns away.

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