I finally uploaded the iPod charger I made. It can be found here. Any comments are welcome as always

I’m building a ipod wall charger from scratch and the burning question was how much current does an ipod nano consume when charging? Well today with a quick test setup I found it to be 100mA. This is great news, the USB specification allows for 500mA on a port but the Ipod uses only a small part of it. Expect a circuit and/or tutorial of the charger sometime in the future.

I’ve stopped working on the temperature display for now. There are some personal issues I have to deal with this week but work will continue mid next week.

I ran into some interesting challenges with the design of the circuit, lets just say I was rushed with the making of the main circuit and now some errors made their way on to it. They are more unforeseen issues than errors but anything I missed counts as an error . There are some easy workarounds, and others not so easy, and it would look like some of the errors actually made for a better end result. In the spirit of learning this is really a nice project. I did not realize that the temperature chip (TC77 from microchip) uses a chip select on low and the circuit is designed in a manner that this issue causes a short circuit between the micro controller and the temperature chip. The solution is to create a logic inverter and I found a nice way to make one with a single transistor.

This is all I can share for now, keep an eye here toward the end of next week so you don’t miss the release of this project!

I created a new page for the website where you can look at things I’m working on. I uploaded two pictures of a circuit I’m building on the Preview page. It will eventually show the temperature of the room on the 7 segment displays.

We moved our website from an old domain (www.strydominc.za.net) to a new one (www.flatspike.com) and created a complete re-design all in one step. It was a tedious process to get everything to an acceptable working level (after the move), much harder than I first expected. If you got caught in the middle of this I apologize. If you encounter any errors while visiting this website please post a comment to this thread and I will deal with it as soon as possible!

If you are wondering where the music and the photo page went, I decided it was best to create another website for them. In the meanwhile visit them at the source. I linked to them in the sidebar under my websites.

Thanks for sticking with me!

If you are looking for one of the following pages (listed below) please follow the link in the meanwhile. I’m busy updating the automatic redirect structure as we speak!

Electronics: USB powered temperature display (Stage[2/5])
Matlab: Plot smoother
Matlab: Series RLC response plotter
PHP: flickr photo album
PHP: last.fm chart draw

Thanks for understanding!

Hi and welcome to the website. If you got here by following a link going to www.strydominc.za.net then don’t fear you are at the right place. I decided to make a pre emptive move from my old domain name to this one (www.flatspike.com), as luck would have it a company with the old name was already registered and to avoid any problems I made the switch.

Im going to start moving the content on to this website, when its all done I will make the official swap. There might be some downtime at that time. I will post more details as we near the swap time.