Electronics

LaserDriver - A6211

Recently, a friend of mine talked to me about his new hobby - handheld lasers. A big downside of the cheap lasers purchased from China turns out to be the design of their laser diode driver boards. Most of them are based on the LM358 operational amplifier and use a bipolar transistor to regulate the current. There is one major problem with this configuration - the transistor dissipates a lot of heat - especially if the voltage of the batteries is significantly larger than the forward voltage of the laser diode.

DeltaBrd - Breakout Board for an Altera (Intel) Max V CPLD

For a few months now, we have been testing our design of a flexible breakout board for the Max V line of Altera CPLD chips. It performed very well in our prototype application for lighting control and up to now we are very happy with it. The DeltaBrd is designed for Max V chips in a 100-TQFP package: 5M80Z,  5M160Z,  5M240Z, 5M570Z. The images below show both sides of the board.

AlphaBrd - power supply and voltage level translator board

The AlphaBrd operates from a single 8V - 12V DC power supply. It provides 3.3V and 5V to other devices by means of two AMS1117 LDO linear regulators. For voltage level translation, it uses one 74(A)HCT245 and one 74LVC245 integrated circuit. An led indicates if the board is powered. There is also a protection diode in case you accidentally reverse the input voltage.

BetaBrd - Breakout Board for Atmel AVR ATtiny84A, 44A or 24A

In the course of the last few months, I built and worked with this flexible breakout board in order to test the ATtiny84A, ATtiny44A and ATtiny24A capabilities in a mesh network. It performed very well and satisfied the needs completely. Now, I would like to offer you the chance to use the BetaBrd in your own projects.