EmilyJane:
I think I'm about to pull the trigger on a Saleae Logic analyzer. The demo on OS X looks pretty good ...
I use mine on OS/X - almost all the screenshots I post here are from the Mac. Particularly since I use "partial screen capture" to get the relevant part I am interested in from the on-screen display.
It appears to be well integrated with OS X's GUI. Sometimes not the case with products that have been ported from Windows.
As an aside, I would like to see a "trigger out" implemented on one of these inexpensive logic analyzers. Something I could use to trigger an analog oscilloscope based on a digital word. I realize that it would be possible to build such a circuit, but it seems like all the requirements are already in the LA.
Edit: Strange, when I do a partial screen copy to clipboard and paste into Photoshop, I get a solid blue image. When I save as a jpeg and open it in Photoshop, I get a solid black image. "Grab" works as you would expect.
Er, yes mine does that too. But I had in fact been using command+shift+4 rather than their inbuilt thing.
Better send them a bug report. 
I had forgotten those keyboard shortcuts. I put Grab in the Dock and got used to using it from there. Yeah, definitely tell them. I am as soon as mine arrives. The more the merrier.
NKC Electronics sending me e-mails requesting me to review stuff I bought fairly recently:
LCD-0031 RGB LCD 65K color module
MCU-0016 Pocket AVR Programmer
SMD-0103 AVR ISP programmer Adapter KIT 10 to 6 pin
MCU-0023 SpeakJet
ARD-0007 Freeduino Arduino-compatible Runtime board Rev B
My little project table got kicked out of the living room to make room for furniture - all the bits are back in boxes in my "lab" waiting for me to make room so I can get a chair in there! Forgot I even purchased some of that stuff. Too much going on ...
Hardly my latest purchase, but my first "programmers" calculator...
More details here (I have nothing to do with this web site):
http://www.christophlorenz.de/calc/ti/programmer.php?l=en
Unfortunately the batteries leaked sometime over the last 35 years, but I was able to power it up by connecting it to a 9V battery.
I love old calculators. I had a TI-2500 which is lost to time somewhere but I still have a working HP16C programmer's calculator and a working HP45. Both are in storage right now but I'll dig them out and photograph them sometime. Not my latest purchases either. 
I could solve for square roots using Newton's Method on the the TI2500 very quickly.
I had one of those TI programmer's calculators. The lower case b and the number 6 look different, but can be easily confused. I did that once on a project and overlapped disk segments for a database. This was back in the 70s and it caused no end of grief. When I finally discovered the problem after several database losses and restores I had to suffer humiliation for a couple of weeks from the other folks. I never, ever made that mistake again.
My latest purchase? A 3/4 inch brass check valve for the water heater drain. I'm going to fork it off so the water softener can drain outside instead of into my septic tank. Local code required me to dump it in the septic (idiots), but they're gone now so I can sneak a change in. And yes, I've already switched to potassium chloride so it won't kill the foliage, such as it is in the desert.
EmilyJane:
I love old calculators.
The interesting thing about the TI Programmer calculator was that, according to the web site above, it was a "calculator on a chip". So inside, apart from the battery pack, was a single chip wired to the LEDs. No resistors, capacitors, anything else except wire. And of course the LEDs were multiplexed.
So I wonder if you could do that with the Atmega? If you ran on the internal oscillator you wouldn't need a crystal. And if you run off batteries you don't (really) need a voltage regulator. And from batteries maybe you could get away with no decoupling capacitors, especially at low speed.
You'd still need current limiting resistors for the LED display, wouldn't you?
Not with PWM and multiplexing I don't think. An example is here:
http://jimmieprodgers.com/kits/lolshield/
This Lots of Leds shield (which I have one of in my hand) doesn't have any resistors on it.
I don't quite know how that works, but I suppose that putting the maximum that the pin can deliver into an LED for a very short period of time damages neither the LED nor the processor chip.
When multiplexing LEDs, as you know, the average current based on the duty cycle is what matters so I guess that if you have enough digits, it works out not to kill the chip.
Those early calculator chips were MOS devices which were easy to integrate the equivalent of resistors into so that and multiplexing made it safe for them.
Companies like Mostek and TI went crazy in the early days of LSI, building all sorts of single chip solutions just because they could. HP was big on minimum chip-count designs as well. The early calculator industry is responsible for much of the miniaturization that spun off other industries like digital watches. Then calculators became PDAs and MP3 players and then smartphones and then tablets... Where will it end?
But yeah, I'll bet you could do that with an Atmel as well.
Companies like Mostek and TI went crazy in the early days of LSI, building all sorts of single chip solutions just because they could. HP was big on minimum chip-count designs as well. The early calculator industry is responsible for much of the miniaturization that spun off other industries like digital watches.
And of course Intel got their start in microprocessors by supplying on contract the 4004 4 bit microprocessor and support chips to a calculator company. So in one way it could be said that the calculator industry is directly linked and responsible for the present day PC.
EmilyJane:
I think I'm about to pull the trigger on a Saleae Logic analyzer. The demo on OS X looks pretty good and I'm tired of waiting for someone to port the USBee SX to OS X. I like the USBee but it would be a lot handier to have something I didn't have to boot Windows to use.
I've made two purchases this year that I'm incredibly happy with. The first is the Saleae Logic, the second is the Bus Pirate (SparkFun version). Both are incredibly useful devices, and they coexist on my bench quite nicely.
Saleae gets bonus points for a very nice OSX native application and an awesome machined aluminum case. Bus Pirate gets additional points for breadth of capability.
I've got a Bus Pirate, but haven't really worked out what real-world application I can use it for. The Logic analyzer is very useful, I use that practically every day.
I just Googled for examples and found this:
I suppose what Bus Pirate does, that an analyzer doesn't, is let you feed data into the stream. Is that what you use it for?
The main page has lots of documentation and examples, and it has a crazy active user community:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate
I use my Bus Pirate a lot when hacking new devices; it speaks SPI, i2c, CAN, 1-Wire, etc natively. Plug it in to the device and communicate with it via a serial terminal. It's amazingly useful. It's also really handy as a replacement for several single-purpose gizmos (CPLD/FPGA programmer, etc).
Synthetos makes a really nice laser cut lexan enclosure for the device that makes it a lot more practical for bench use: https://www.synthetos.com/webstore/index.php/bus-pirate-v3-enclosure-sfe-edition.html
The price seems to keep going down on these USB TTL serial converter modules. I had bought one before but at these prices I couldn't resist getting two more.
Uses:
Upload sketches via IDE to 'standalone' boards. Therefore not requiring including a FTDI or 8u2 chip, just a female sip connector to plug in this module only when required. The design of this unit makes it easy to add a .1ufd cap from the DTR pad to the reset pin on the connector, and then cut the trace originally going to the reset pin. So the IDE initated auto-reset function works great.
Use as a serial debugger port using software serial and sending debug messages to any PC terminal program.
At $3.39 (including shipping!), what have you got to lose? http://www.ebay.com/itm/370532286388?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649
Two items, both sniped for great deals. The first is a decent deal, but the second may be a resell and profit buy:
|  | MAX3002 Logic level Shifter - 99 cents. This ought to come in handy, odd that I've not seen the module out there before. Maybe the chip is sold as Surface mount only, I didn't look if there's a DIP out there for it.. I would think there would be.. but the module is a convenient way to handle it anyway. Update: Seems that it's only available in the SMT 20pin, FYI |
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|  | X10 Home Solutions "Grab Box" - $23.00 shipped. The box on the bottom is pack of wall modules and controller bridge to PC. Guy bought all this stuff and never used it. Looks like there's an Arduino/X-10 project in my future... I've already got a box with some modules and a x-10 security camera I got from a yard sale a while back, and another box with a couple of Z-Wave modules I got given to me.. though I wasn't impressed with Z-wave. Hmm, x-10 to zwave bridge could be useful I bet.. |
Ain't Ebay grand?
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