August 2010

Alex showed the circuit and programming details of his tuned radio and showed his design of an electric footwarmer mat.
Peter showed the Logicator system for developing programs for PIC and PICaxe chips from flowcharts. Les showed details of the remote monitoring security system he has designed.

July 2010

Les showed samples of the bottles handled by the robot he described last month, and gave details of how they are made.
Alex showed us an alarm clock radio to which he had added a Picaxe08M to play its tunes on wake-up.
Bob showed videos of various multi-legged robots.
Neville visited the Microzed webpage to show the new Picaxe-18M2. It replaces all the older 18 pin Picaxes, can run four separate tasks in parallel and operate from a 3volt battery pack. 
Stuart showed how he used Microchip's 16 bit development board to make a voltmeter.

June 2010 

Andrew showed a way of getting a Picaxe08M to log data at long intervals by using the Poke instruction. 
Les showed a movie of an industrial robot and the modifications he made to its program. It is an xyz type of robot 10 metres long that stacks plastic bottles of various shapes at high speed. 
David showed a advanced PIC-based travel clock he built, and discussed the program he wrote for it in 800 lines of assembler. His tutorials on programming can be seen on his website gooligum.com.au.
JD showed several PCBs he designed with Eagle, using Freescale microcontrollers. 
We were able to project on the screen images of all the objects discussed on the night, by using the auto-focussing webcam installed recently by Roger Foulds of our parent organisation, the Sydney PC User Group. Thanks Roger.

May 2010

Andrew showed a PCB he built in 1987 using an 1802 microprocessor, and a sample from that era of a PCB layout using tape. Chris asked for help with a program he wrote for an Arduino/PIC/I2C project, and in a lengthy session the group was able to solve many problems. Shane showed more details of the modifications he is making to an old Holden, including fuel injection and monitoring of its vital signs using Tuner Studio MS, msefi.com, diyefi.com. Peter showed us how to find rare ICs. Niel showed a sensor he is developing for air conditioning using an R485 chip and a PIC16648A

Anthony showed an upgraded version of his digital clock. He built it this time on predrilled copper strip board using six GAL16V8 programmable chips. John demonstrated wire wrapping technique, and gave Anthony some wrapping tools and sample boards. Bob showed the SPCUG blog and the Snagit screen capture program. Neville showed the January 2009 Silicon Chip article on remote wireless control using a PIC and a transceiver. Alex demonstrated RocketDoc, the free application launcher. He also showed the free download OSC_DLL, from which he is building a software oscilloscope.

March 2010

Peter talked about remote wireless control of devices using a PIC/transceiver combination to send signals to a similar pair wired to 
multiple devices. Anthony showed us a digital clock he built on solderless breadboards from ICs and discrete components. He intends to upgrade it to a PIC-controlled device. Peter introduced us to Source Boot. Stuart showed us Microchip's DM300027, a USB starter development board for programming 16 bit microprocessors. It comes with a PIC24 and a PIC30 and can connect to a PICKit2. Les showed Insider, a useful tool for wireless networking that displays frequencies used. 

February 2010

Les talked about a computer-controlled milling machine he built from a kit, and showed a video of it cutting various holes in an instrument case. He also showed a low-voltage spotlight he made from an array of 28 white wide-angle LEDs controlled by an Atmel Tiny 45. Michael showed pictures of a machine he built for automatically making cups of tea, and discussed his problems programming a PIC to run it. Martin talked about the EZ430-Chronos watch available from Farnell.

January 2010

Stuart showed the latest developments of his programming language. Using a PIC30 he calculated the square of pi to 8 decimal places. Martin explained his straingage project and showed its hardware. Anthony showed his Microbyte development board for PICs. Peter showed us GPutils, a set of software tools on SourceForge, including the simulator GPSIM. Neville showed a video from Instructables showing a remote controlled lawnmower, and introduced the RF Digital miniature radio tranceivers that can be driven by a microprocessor to communicate with multiple other tranceivers.

2009 <—