Monthly Archives: April 2018

Simplifying Assembly: Open Source Manual Pick & Place Assistance

Building prototypes is fun but can be a huge time sink.  Hunting around on the board–how many 10k resistors are there? where is R15? ugh. Thankfully, Colin O’Flynn created an program to help you while you’re acting as a meatbag pick and place machine.  MeatbagPnP is a python application that takes generated placement files and…

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Powering your breadboard: Options, Reviews and Caveats

Though most of my projects wind up with their own regulators on-board, the breadboard is the go-to of choice when it’s time to just try something out.  Since pretty much everything I play with needs juice, this will be a little review of some of the options I’ve used, and what I’ve learned in doing…

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Quick & Easy Attitude and Heading Reference System

Though I’d used the Razor 9DoF and a few other IMUs, it’d been a few years since I got to play with an AHRS.  Recently, I got a request to tweak a system using the MPU-9250, a nine-axis (gyro, accelerometer and compass) MEMS device, to see how nicely we could get it to play. I…

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