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WTD: WWVB receiver

J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Spehro said:
Neither of those cost $10 retail. I suppose that it's barely possible
to see an LCD module in a $10 retail item, but I have not seen it.

It must be possible. I remember a very detailed cost study in the 90's
to show the efficiency of the Chinese electronics mfg marketplace. The
"corpus delicti" was a fax machine that was calculated to come in under
$10 in production and it had a single-line LCD module that was connected
via a very skinny ribbon.

BTW I also parted out a single line LCD module from a speaker phone that
had cost 30 Deutschmarks. Ok, not quite $10 but very close.

I tried subbing an OLED 2 x 20 module into my Siemens phone base
station but it didn't work (probably a timing issue). Another 2-line
HD44780-based module did work. A little hot glue and it's good for
another year or two.




Also a useful approach with some of the PC related I/O stuff. Ignore
all the unnecesary stuff and extra leads.

Yeah, I remember those practical parallel ports and game ports. Useful
for a lot of EE tasks but now all gone :-(
 
A

Ancient_Hacker

Jan 1, 1970
0
I've played with this a bit.

You might be able to get by with a few dozen turns of wire, resonated
at 60HKz with a 0.082 capacitor,
, couple of op-amp stages, separated by 60KHz xtal filters.

Digi key has 60.000 and 60.0002 xtals for a song. You need the .002
variety for the series elements.

The xtals are a bit too sharp, with a bandwidth under 0.2 Hz. You
need to dsign in a lower Q quite a bit to get the data to come
through!
 
D

Don Lancaster

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ancient_Hacker said:
I've played with this a bit.

You might be able to get by with a few dozen turns of wire, resonated
at 60HKz with a 0.082 capacitor,
, couple of op-amp stages, separated by 60KHz xtal filters.

Digi key has 60.000 and 60.0002 xtals for a song. You need the .002
variety for the series elements.

The xtals are a bit too sharp, with a bandwidth under 0.2 Hz. You
need to dsign in a lower Q quite a bit to get the data to come
through!

Drill a hole in the can to air damp the crystal.
Should be enough.

--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: [email protected]

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Donald said:
Yes, and most of these hits are hit like this newsgroup.

Everyone like to talk about it, but few have any usefull information.

:)

Maybe that is because there aren't any cheap modules?
 
J

Joel Kolstad

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Yeah, I remember those practical parallel ports and game ports. Useful for
a lot of EE tasks but now all gone :-(

Parallel ports for "general purpose I/O" were never very good, in my
experience. Back in the DOS days, sure, but by the time PCs were running
Real OSes (roughly Windows NT onward, or OS/2 or Linux), getting some hacked
together I/O going through the parallel port would no longer count as a
particularly "clean" solution in my book. Plenty of engineering time was
wasted over the years trying to get, e.g., dongles working with printers,
parallel port scanners or zip drives behaving, PROM programmers from the DOS
days working under Windows 95 (I was bit by that one), etc. (Although I
will say I thought the Iomega "adapter" dongle that went from a parallel
port to their SCSI Jaz driver was pretty slick, and always worked quite well
for me.)

These days you can get plenty of USB interface "boxes" for <$50 that are
much more versatile than 99% of what people used to do with parallel and
game ports, and with none of the hassle. In my mind that's a significant
step up in utility for the EE...

---Joel
 
R

Rich Grise

Jan 1, 1970
0
.
These days you can get plenty of USB interface "boxes" for <$50 that are
much more versatile than 99% of what people used to do with parallel and
game ports, and with none of the hassle. In my mind that's a
significant step up in utility for the EE...

Can you post a link? What's on the "world" side of these boxen? Could you
get one with just a bunch of I/O's, the way the printer port used to work?

Thanks,
Rich
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Rich said:
Can you post a link? What's on the "world" side of these boxen? Could you
get one with just a bunch of I/O's, the way the printer port used to work?

Yes but it's going to cost you. Labjack already contains some functions
in there but it'll be around $100 for the lowest cost version.

To me USB was a bit of a step back. You have to be quite the programmer
to get your own stuff going (which I am not). And you can't do a cheap
hack to read an HPIB output anymore.

Joel is right in that USB is easier to use but that's more for the
plug-and-play folks. Except for very mundane functions this comes at a
price. Example: The parallel port programmer for the MSP430 was $16.95.
The USB port programmer that I had to buy because the new lab PC didn't
have a parallel port cost $100. Ok, not much for a business, of course,
but I'd say that a cost of process ownership increase by about 8dB is
significant. Meantime TI came out with a cheap (and very nice) $20 USB
pod but it's restricted to the new F2xxx family and cannot do full JTAG.

There is one rather easy method to get into the swing of USB: Cypress
has a PSoC demo board and this contains a USB link. Their PSoC Express
software lets you graphically piece together applications such as
USB-I2C, USB-RS232, USB-whatever. Even I as an analog guy got that going
in under 1/2 hour during their seminar. Very nice. Initially I pondered
whether that Cypress seminar would be worth it. It definitely was, every
minute of it (and thanks go to Arrow).
 
A

Ancient_Hacker

Jan 1, 1970
0
Drill a hole in the can to air damp the crystal.
Should be enough.


Oh! Clever!

But is that limited to crystals that vibrate in a certain mode, with
the ends flapping? In a compresion mode, uninformed intuition
suggests the effect of air might be negligible. What a fun thing to
explore when one gets a free minute.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ancient_Hacker said:
Oh! Clever!

But is that limited to crystals that vibrate in a certain mode, with
the ends flapping? In a compresion mode, uninformed intuition
suggests the effect of air might be negligible. What a fun thing to
explore when one gets a free minute.

Just watch out that the school buses get re-routed so the amount of soot
getting in there is limited. Else you'll have to train some ants who
periodically clean in there with Windex ;-)
 
D

Don Lancaster

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ancient_Hacker said:
Oh! Clever!

But is that limited to crystals that vibrate in a certain mode, with
the ends flapping? In a compresion mode, uninformed intuition
suggests the effect of air might be negligible. What a fun thing to
explore when one gets a free minute.
Worked like a champ with plain old traditional quartz crystals.

Q dropped from something like 6000 to 1000.



--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: [email protected]

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
 
D

Don Lancaster

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joerg said:
Just watch out that the school buses get re-routed so the amount of soot
getting in there is limited. Else you'll have to train some ants who
periodically clean in there with Windex ;-)

Naturally, you solder or epoxy the hole after removing the vacuum and
storing it elsewhere.


--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: [email protected]

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
 
K

Kevin G. Rhoads

Jan 1, 1970
0
Naturally, you solder or epoxy the hole after removing the vacuum and
storing it elsewhere.

You can even discard the vacuum. But remember, proper disposal! or
the enviro-Nazis will be after you ;-)

[Note to the humo(u)r-impaired. Above is joke.]
 
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