I'm just having a quick play with the E14 Personal Blog feature, as it's more interesting than clearing my work bench, and very few people are using it. I think the last blog entry I posted was in 1996, regarding a bug in a popular codelock system, so apologies if I'm a bit rusty.
Quick intro: The son of an EE, I've been around electronics all my life. In the mid 90's I fixed TV's, radio's, VCR's and analogue STB's before studying computer engineering at university. Tinkered with Z80 and 80C51's a little but picked up microchip PICs in '98 and have been using them regularly since for things from jewelry to fuel injection systems. I'm a big fan of the old ISA bus, serial interfaces, and keeping things simple (I don't agree with using complex high power systems when a simple low power one will do the job). Most recent commercial projects were in environmental monitoring and protocol conversion for interfacing physical security systems. Current personal projects include gadgets and instruments for Land Rovers, a model boat navigation system and wireless, solar powered, data loggers.
Some things that arrived in the post recently which I'll write up shortly:
Above: Microchip's MRF24J40-I/ML.MRF24J40-I/ML. 2.4 gig radio chips with aerial and tuning circuit - Just add SPI for a £6 per node encrypted 250kbit wireless network. These look like quite promising little modules, and for a few quid more, come with a little power amp / pre-amp cobo for longer range. What I'm keen to try out is mounting these in place of the existing passive aerial on low cost point-to-point dishes, or even "inside the can" for the classic Pringles Cantenna project. If these work, I may be tempted to use them where I've always used 433MHz modules in the past, just because they (kinda) support SPI. Nice: 2uA sleep, all the RF stuff is done for you. Nasty: No tristate on SDO pin.... Doh!
Above Left: RF Solutions SmartAlpha module has useful buffering, variable RF output power, variable squelch gate with carrier detect output, low standby power, versatile addressing, soft frequency selection and a less quirky RF stage than its predecessor the TRXQ1.
Above Right: One of several misbehaving TRXQ1's received from CPC a couple of years ago. The datasheet's a bit poor - only in the examples section is the important note made that several of the inputs are driven by the module (Yes. Driven INPUTS.) so they need series resistors. A number of these modules have stopped receiving, and they don't have any power saving features either.
Finally above A pair of ST STM8S-Discovery board ST have found a great way to promote their little STM8S here For less than a fiver you can get a USB ST-Link programmer and a small demo board. The demo board has a microcontroller, 4 12 pin headers (.1" 2x6) for connecting off-board, a 16MHz crystal, a capacitive touchpad, LED, all the relevant resistors and capacitors for pullups, pulldowns and power supply decoupling, a 3.3/5v select jumper (Programmer supplies both voltages) and a small prototyping area, complete with pads for SMT IC's. The cheapo dev kit can also be snapped in half, leaving individual programmer and demo boards. To use the programmer on its own without snapping the board, solder links are provided to isolate the two halves. Out of the box, you plug into a PC USB port and the kit appears as a removable harddisk, containing links to the product website - nice touch. These are in stock at Farnell at the moment, and check out the E14 road tests, as there are some to be given away shortly.
I've tried to do some work with these, but the Cosmic compiler wants a working email client to be installed on the workstation! The alternate compiler is easier to set up.
I will be putting together a roadtest article based on using the STM8S-Discovery to replace a PIC in one of my current projects