Well, the end of the quarter is near and it is time to make yet another Blog Post. This morning I have been working on re-acquiring my O-scope skill set. It went pretty well since I dug out my rather fine 100MHz rated probes (ebay deal!) and hooked them up to my easy to transport Tektronix TDS-210. Some how I managed to tell the O-scope that my probes had 100x attenuation and I had not even looked at or set the 1x/10x switch on the probe handle! Needless to say it troubled me greatly when the display indicated the the signal being measured was way over 50 volts and my battery pack was only 6 volts. I finally got that sorted out and the 555 timer circuit (as found on page 160 of "Making Things Move" by Dustyn Roberts; wherein the circuit diagram has an error!?! but the text instructions are correct) ran with a 2.5 sec period (0.4 Hz) and duty cycle varied with the setting of the potentiometer. Anyway, I decided to make the thing run really fast so I yanked out that electrolytic cap on pin 2 and punched in a little bitty ceramic cap and all of a sudden that 555 timer was running at 50 kHz. All the better to make a nice trace on the sweet 60 MHz 0-scope. So here is a newly edited photo taken with my nifty Sony Cybershot DSC-WX50. It is a cut and paste merger of two photos (kind of like someone's alledged Hawaiian birth certificate); one with the flash and one with no flash. The flash reflection on the screen was just terrible, so I fixed it in the Win 7 Paint application. The digital image stabilization on board the camera is fantastic in my opinion. Just zoom into the image (Ctrl+ or Ctrl-Mouse Scroll up) to see the detail of the image without artifacts due to small image presentation size.
I hope everyone has a great last week of this very strange year of 2012. Thanks again for the PIC^3, DrewF. Let's drink a toast to an even stranger 2013.