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.

Today I added a small page for the USART communication test program I use. Its a very simple implementation of the hardware USART capabilities of the Microchip PIC18F1220 micro controller. You can find the page here: USART communication (hardware).

And I have a long overdue site update to prove it! Im working on a Terrarium Project and one of my tasks is SPI communication. I wrote a quick page for it, you can find it here. As always comments are welcome.

I created a new page under the electronics projects to show how you can easily build your own logic inverter with two resistors and a transistor. It can be found here: Single transistor logic inverter

If you are visiting me from the mathworks internal website, welcome! I usually enjoy looking at the pages I get linked from but since this is hosted on your internal network I can’t and its burning me from the inside! If any of you would be so kind to throw me a e-mail, comment or even a saved page or screenshot (via e-mail) I’d really appreciate it. jurgen [dot] strydom [at] gmail [dot] com

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.