Electronics and Radio Control

"Do you want crunchy or smooth peanut butter on your sandwich" - Sweet Sue
"Smooth" - Son
"That's good, because I don't have any crunchy" - Sweet Sue
What can I say? - Life is a gamble.

Circuits and software provided here are not guaranteed to work for you, and are only fit for use in the particular application for which they have been developed. In many cases they are just experimental. To use this information you need to have a good understanding of how the circuit works, and be able to adapt it yourself to your own purposes. If you choose to use any information that you republish or use in any further development, then it is ethical to acknowledge the author. On that note, if you see that I have not acknowledged anything that others have published, and it is not in the public domain, then please let me know.

ARM Microcontrollers	Raspberry Pi notes on setup.
	BeagleBone notes on setup for use with BB-View Touchscreen and Debian.
	libopencm3 contributions to library for Cortex Microcontroller level M3,M4.
	Port of FreeRTOS to libopencm3 STM32 Cortex M3.
	Port of Chan-FAT SD/MMC SPI mode to libopencm3 STM32 Cortex M3.
	Port of CanFestival (CANopen) over serial to libopencm3 STM32 Cortex M3.
	Port of FreeModbus to libopencm3 STM32 Cortex M3.
	Embest SBC6000X ARM Microcontroller board review and installation of Linux.
Atmel AVR Microcontrollers	Scheduling Operating System - absolute minimum size.
	Bootloader and Programmer upload firmware to AVR microcontroller via a serial port.
	Libraries: ADC, I2C master, I2C Slave.
	Serial Debug Tools. For testing serial interfaces.
Networking	Notes on Networking Standards for Data Acquisition.
	XBee in AP Mode (ZigBee stack) notes and code.
	XBee Network for Data Acquisition.
Energy Management	Solar Battery Management System: a battery charger and management system for solar power incorporating multiple batteries and load switching.
Energy Management	Battery Charging Algorithm: an algorithm designed for efficient and safe charging of multiple sealed lead acid batteries in an energy management system.
Power Conversion/Storage	Power Conversion Projects: a variety of dc-dc converter circuits. (*)
	Battery Chargers: a variety of battery charger circuits. (*)
	Energy Saving Fluorescent Globe investigation.
	Almost Ideal Diode for Power Circuits. (*)
	Lead Acid Batteries. Tests and techniques for regeneration of sulphated batteries.
Solar Power Model	Solar Electric Power System Model: predict system efficiencies.
Radio Control	Remote control of power switches: using Hope Electronics RF modules.
Radio Control	Serial Link Transceiver: using Hope Electronics RFM12 modules.
gEDA HOWTO	Notes on installation and using opensource EDA tools for discrete circuit simulation.

(*) to be updated.

Circuit simulation tools being made freely available are:

gEDA is a Linux based circuit simulation tool being developed in the opensource world. This was initially aimed at PCB development, but can be used with SPICE or other simulators for simulation work. Installation and use are not as straightforward as the commercial tools, but it is a package that is very capable, and hopefully will eventually evolve into a very user friendly end result. A major problem remaining for SPICE simulation is the unavailability of suitable models for components.
For electronic circuit simulation on an inferior operating system, PSpice has proved to be an excellent although limited tool since the mid 1990s. PSpice version 8 is best if you can get it, however Orcad (who bought out Microsim) provides a student version of their modified PSpice. I haven't used this version a great deal. It is a freely available, comprehensive and easy to use tool for student learning in circuit design.
Intusoft SPICE3-based Analogue and Mixed Simulation Software oriented towards power applications provides a limited circuit size free demonstration version.
5Spice is a GUI wrapper for SPICE, running in an inferior operating system and available free for non-commercial use.
LTSpice/SwitcherCAD III is an enhanced SPICE III simulator provided by Linear Technology, including schematic capture and waveform viewing. It is naturally oriented towards LT's products but includes other models.
SIMetrix provides a freeware version of their simulator.

An excellent mathematical package is SCILAB, also freely available for Linux. It can be used to study control systems, which are quite easy to setup to provide various views of pole-zero behaviour. It seems to be like a combination of Matlab and Mathcad, I gather.

All original work presented here is copyright to the author. Circuits and hardware documentation may be used according to the provided open hardware licence and software under the GPL version 2 or later licence. Some software is licensed under the BSD licence to simplify commercial use.

Contact: My email address can be constructed from the username "ksarkies" and the ISP DNS address internode.on.net in the usual way.