Your latest purchase

Last time it was about 2 weeks when I expected 3.
I paid $3 extra for Fedex and figure less than 2 weeks.
What I don't know is about parts in stock.
DX hung me up twice out of 5 orders on stock. Both times there were big holidays in China.

For me the wait is not a big deal. Getting my parts is and so far I've always gotten my parts. Next down the list is parts being what I thought and for 3 particular parts out of many I ordered too quick from DX where the lack of info can equal or exceed the clear info.

Last of all, I did buy cheap ($2) hand-crank cell phone chargers from DX that are jokes. They have a wondrously inefficient set of plastic gears to drive a tiny motor/generator that does a great job of lighting the power led with moderate effort but 5V requires major effort. I might try one if it was an emergency and I was stuck. Caveat Emptor! I could probably do better putting a crank on a stepper motor or something.

3 old purchases just gave me 6 good size super magnets. :smiley: They make the super field that the voice coil moves across strong and precise enough for the HD to work back when it did. That's one kick@$$ field, it's got an arc shaped magnet above and one below. Want to build a strong generator or motor? These are worth a few bucks each.

These are bad HD's from back in the 90's. It takes a bit of work and a set of small torx drivers but hmmmm-ha these are IMO worth it.

One thing; case labels and warranty stickers usually cover a couple of screws that if you find them and get them off then you won't need a pry bar or claw hammer to get the damn lid off!

The platters are nice too. They'd make nice Tesla Turbine disks.

A medium sized cardboard box stuffed with new old stock archer / radio shack parts for 5 bucks at the thrift store!

GoForSmoke:
The platters are nice too. They'd make nice Tesla Turbine disks.

Or frisbees. In high school we had a Vax 750/11 with a RL02 removable hard disk drive, among other, refrigerator-sized attachments. These RL02 discs crashed often, and we'd scavenge the insides of the carrier for the platters and play frisbee with them. At about 14" across and heavy, good palm protection was a must, as was good aim. Otherwise, you'd be at risk of a 'oddjob' re-enactment.

In terms of disk platters, Richard Stallman (the guy who created the Free Software Foundation, Emacs, and GCC) came to last year's Gnu Cauldren in Prague for the 25th anniversary of the creation of GCC), and after talking about serious issues in terms of keeping software free, he donned his robes as Saint IGNUcius, and his halo in a former life was a disk platter:

GoForSmoke:
The platters are nice too. They'd make nice Tesla Turbine disks.

Just make sure you don't get one of the ones that use coated glass/ceramic platters!

"Weird Stuff Warehouse" recently acquired a load 12inch laser-disks, and I bought one ($1 each!) just to add to my "collection of obsolete media."

Atmel Capacitive Touch Sensors , these are the one channel , i also purchased a couple 7 Channel .

aarondc:

GoForSmoke:
Got another order in with Yourduino.

What's their stock level / shipping time like?

Box got in after spending time playing tag with Fedex. From order to arrival worked out to 4 days on a 3 to 6 day shipping method.

Everything arrived in good shape in a sealed & bubble-padded package.

I'm set for a while except maybe I want more of those 5/$1 RGB leds and shift registers to drive them with, or maybe I want analog led drivers.....

Thanks for the follow up, GoForSmoke.

Ordered a bunch more stuff from dx.com and sparkfun.com. futurlec.com might be less-dodgy looking than dx, but dx.com deliver quicker and have good prices, their kit works, and they refunded the second debit they put on my card within the week they estimated it would take to do so. Been three weeks since I placed my futurlec.com order and it still has not been sent. All the items they listed in their email as out of stock when I queried them were still listed as IN STOCK on the site. Meh.

DX have shipped a large order in 3 separate lots in the same time. Sparkfun will have shipped 2 orders separated by 3 weeks before the futurelec.com order arrives. It's been a good lesson for me if I ever manage to come up with a product people want to buy and I want to sell. New SFE order was for some headers and what not but more importantly, a Makerbeam kit. Gotta love free shipping - that's $140 cheaper than it was the week before.

Managed to interface most things from my last dx/SFE orders last week, which has been a good learning experience: GPS, bluetooth, USB port, RF remote control and RF transceivers, as well as some other bits and pieces like LED units. My new DX order was essentially some more of the above, as well as some headers and other bits and pieces.

Pointers are my Achilles heel in C, so I bought the kindle version of this last night:

I have been researching FPGA devices, and decided on VHDL as the language I want to learn. Very few of the FPGA books are available electronically, so was pleased to find the kindle version of this last night, after reading some good reviews on amazon:

And to help me learn VHDL, I lashed out and got one of these off Ebay ($182 with free postage):

I'll turn to the FPGA book and board when my Arduino projects start bogging down or I need a break.

aarondc:
And to help me learn VHDL, I lashed out and got one of these off Ebay ($182 with free postage):

I'll turn to the FPGA book and board when my Arduino projects start bogging down or I need a break.

Last summer I got this board from Terasic, using an oldish student card:

Very good deal. It's been fun to mess with and throw Verilog against to try stuff out. The chip is HUGE. I see your board is this one after a little bit of searching:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ALTERA-FPGA-NIOS-CYCLONE-IV-EP4CE15-USB-BLASTER-Power-Adapter-Many-Gift-E082-/261058354313

If you have a student card, the Terasic board is a great deal, 115K LEs as opposed to 15K LEs, but I suppose that doesn't matter until you need them. Even 15K is a lot compared to CPLDs.

JoeN:

aarondc:
And to help me learn VHDL, I lashed out and got one of these off Ebay ($182 with free postage):

I'll turn to the FPGA book and board when my Arduino projects start bogging down or I need a break.

Last summer I got this board from Terasic, using an oldish student card:

Terasic - All FPGA Boards - Cyclone IV - Altera DE2-115 Development and Education Board

Very good deal. I guess it is similar to yours. It's been fun to mess with and throw Verilog against to try stuff out. The chip is HUGE.

I spent some time working out if I could get a uni friend to get one for me - given I have not been a uni student for a while, and in the end decided The cheaper board was less hassle. Those DE2-115s look unreal though. If I had a student card it would have been a no brainer.

So um.

After installing Android Studio and mucking about for a day, I managed to develop something.

A headache.

A few days later, I discovered Basic 4 Android, had a look through some examples, had a quick play with the demo version and watched the Intro video. Then bought it.

This evening, I managed to develop my first ever Android app that connects to a HC06 module connected to an Arduino Mega, and pass information between the Android app running on my phone and Arduino app running on my Mega.

I'm prototyping the system using the serial monitor I wrote, so the workflow gets a bit intense switching between Delphi as I add new monitor functions to make prototyping easier, to Basic to update the Android app, to C/C++ to update the Arduino app. Getting the =, :=, == and the ', " right takes patience and concentration.

But it works. And it's so straight forward with so many B4A example apps that putting things together is almost a doddle. The example app code is uglier than sin, but it's still a doddle...

Best $69 I have spent in a long while.

Can you post some sample Android Basic Code to show how it looks like?

Think Microsoft VB / VBA and you are there 100% for both code and UI.

Sub Activity_Create(FirstTime As Boolean)
	Activity.LoadLayout("2")
	If AStream.IsInitialized = False Then
		AStream.InitializePrefix(Main.BTSerial.InputStream, True, Main.BTSerial.OutputStream, "AStream")
	End If
	txtLog.Width = 100%x
End Sub

aarondc:

JoeN:

aarondc:
And to help me learn VHDL, I lashed out and got one of these off Ebay ($182 with free postage):

I'll turn to the FPGA book and board when my Arduino projects start bogging down or I need a break.

Last summer I got this board from Terasic, using an oldish student card:

Terasic - All FPGA Boards - Cyclone IV - Altera DE2-115 Development and Education Board

Very good deal. I guess it is similar to yours. It's been fun to mess with and throw Verilog against to try stuff out. The chip is HUGE.

I spent some time working out if I could get a uni friend to get one for me - given I have not been a uni student for a while, and in the end decided The cheaper board was less hassle. Those DE2-115s look unreal though. If I had a student card it would have been a no brainer.

My student card doesn't have an issue date on the front so I tried it and it worked fine, probably 6 years since I took my last class. :slight_smile:

I don't know what a 15,000 LE processor allows me to develop - have you done much with yours?

aarondc:
I don't know what a 15,000 LE processor allows me to develop - have you done much with yours?

Well, no. Mostly just the provided sample configurations. I think they call them programs, but I can't bring myself to call it that, it's really a hardware configuration. I did make a stupid little pushbutton calculator out of a much smaller CPLD (EPM7256 208 pin I got cheap on eBay - 5V operation but small by current standards) and ran it out of room before I could implement all the features I wanted it to have, and it was all simple integer stuff working on 12 BCD digits with the CPLD reading the keypad, storing it into a register, and decoding to 3 4x7 segment displays in a multiplexed scanned fashion - that part works. Maybe I should go back and use a EPM1270 instead. But as an obvious one, you need pretty large FPGAs to create soft processors with larger feature sets, especially if you are going to integrate some additional hardware onto it. I haven't tried a soft processor yet because I haven't figured out where it would be preferable to have instead of a normal hard processor. This is probably just a failure of imagination on my part.

I bought one of these from Amazon/STAHL for $20 to replace my Radio Shack 30W pen.

Soldering Station Features Continuously Variable Power Between 5-40W, a 1.5mm Pointed Tip

I know you pros are shaking your heads at this toy. It doesn't work right out of the box.

First thing I had to do was fix it and that took a Y-shape security tip to get the handle open after rolling & sliding the grip off. Then lift the wires and push inside until the heating element made contact with what it should have been with a nice click. Did that back and forth a few times to be sure then hot glued the wires halfway down the handle to keep it there. They should stay, they're thick, stiff wires in heat shrink.
Put back together, it works now as far as melts solder even turned down though it does take a while to heat up.

I'll see how it goes and probably get my $20 worth.