Archive for the 'Hardware' Category
Bob Lives!
After a couple of false starts with dead voltage regulators, Bob (my daughter named it) the PIC based ethernet device lives in a more permanent incarnation. Bob is made from bits and pieces I had around the place (I now have several very dead network hubs). The budget for the project was zero 
My Dad provided me with the PIC prototyping board pictured above and many of the pieces as well as the PIC18F452. The ENC28J60 ethernet controller was kindly provided by Microchip through their very generous free samples.
The original voltage regulator on the PIC prototyping board didn’t seem to be up to powering both the PIC and the ethernet controller, so I went through my old retired networking gear until I found a 3.3V regulator. Unfortunately I think I popped it in the process of removing it from the board and it no longer worked 
. In the end I used a 7805 5V regulator and then ran the output of that through a pair of diodes in a bridge rectifier (thank again for the help with that one Dad) to drop the voltage down to about 3.5V or so.
. In the end I used a 7805 5V regulator and then ran the output of that through a pair of diodes in a bridge rectifier (thank again for the help with that one Dad) to drop the voltage down to about 3.5V or so.Now I need to get my PIC Forth running on this hardware and then I’ll have a networked Forth device I can play with 
What I’ve been up to lately
I’ve been really busy recently and have not had much time to work on my side projects.
One that I’ve been working on off and on for some time is a networked PIC micro-controller.
This morning I finally got it responding to ICMP echo request (ping)
Some tinkering I’ve been up to recently
I’m working on building a system to measure the water level in my rain water tanks. Finally today I’ve managed to get my hardware all working, and now I need to build the physical measurement device. Originally I was going to use ultra-sound to measure the depth of the water but I decided that was a bit too fiddly. Then I considered using some sort of pressure sensor, but they are a bit on the expensive side. Finally I came up with the idea of using a variable resistor attached to an arm with a float on the end. This seems like the easiest and above all the cheapest way to get what I want
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It should be interesting to see how it all comes together
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