LEAP#226 Music Box Kit
This is a pretty common kit available from multiple sources, although it appears to have been originally produced by icstation.
The heart of the kit is a a potted chip, one of many similar boards primarily produced as the sound effects generators used in toys.
the kit adds supporting circuitry on a PCB to drive a piezo speaker and decode 4 switch inputs to select one of 16 effects.
As demonstrated here, it is possible to drive the board with a microcontroller.
As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub
Does this generate good sound effects? No! Twee at best, horribly poor immitation at worst. But if you want to sound like a cheap toy, this may be exactly what you need;-)
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LEAP#225 FQ777-954 Teardown
The FQ777-954 and it’s derivatives has been a pretty hot item in the nano quadcopter category.
But good technical information is hard to come by beyond the usual product feature specs.
I’m intrigued by the possibilities for building around it, so my first step is to tear one down and
collect as much information about the product as I can.
As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub
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LEAP#224 LED Strobe Kit
Stocking stuffers like this 555/4017 LED strobe kit almost always present interesting challenges/learning opportunities.
Julian Ilett had fun re-wiring the same kit.
For myself, I found out the PCB appeared to have the supplied transistors connected upside down,
and some adjustments to the resistor values yielded a better effect.
As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub
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LEAP#223 Fritzing The Boldport Cuttle
Fritzing may be considered the comic sans of EDA tools,
but it is often the tinkerer’s first experience of designing and documenting breadboard experiments.
Even for the experienced, Fritzing can often be the quickest and easiest route to a simple schematic or design.
If you’ve joined the Boldport Club and have a Cuttle microcontroller (project #6), I have a New Year’s gift for you!
As part of working through the many projects I now have in the LittleArduinoProjects collection, I’ve ended up creating a few custom Fritzing parts. Although Fritzing appears stuck in a perpetual 0.9 beta rut, and the parts designer is a bit of a mystery, it turns out there is enough help and documentation around to make building custom parts a reasonably straight-forward task.
All the parts I’ve created are available in the LEAP#223 Fritzing Parts collection.
Most recently, I made a part for the Boldport Cuttle - which I still maintain is the most beautiful Arduino-compatible board of all time!
The Cuttle is a great project available to Boldport Club members, and if you want to use it for breadboard prototyping then a Fritzing part might help, yes? Since Saar has open sourced the design files, building a part was quite easy. If you just want the part, check it out.
What does a Cuttle really look like? Here’s my build:
Don’t have a cuttle? Just join the Boldport Club and kits are still available for backorder.
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