15pF caps cobbled into Ben’s TV-B-Gone
(Click for more photos…)

So, that TV-B-Gone problem from last night is sorted. Just after coming in from shoveling snow^† I remembered that I had an 8MHz crystal hanging out on the EasyPIC 4 I acquired about a year ago (photo gallery retired). I just dropped the crystal on the board, squeezed in some 15pF caps on the back of the board (not sure if these are the right value, but they should be close enough), and tested it. As expected, it was now working. Also, because we used no-clean flux there wasn’t anything more to clean off. That was quite nice.

To make it a little more pocket-friendly I put some 1″ Harbor Freight Special heatshrink tubing around the main part of the body. This makes it nice and smooth, and parts are less likely to be accidently torn off. (Danielle accidently knocked one of the transistors off… Oops… This will get replaced next time I order something from Mouser or Digi-Key.)

Anyway, it’s working good now. Now it just has to get back to Lapeer and in ‘s possession so he can use it on Christmas.

^† This is normally handled by the condo association, but because of the heavy snowfall I decided to do my porch and in front of my garage myself, instead of waiting for the snow clearing company to get to it.

Wrong Resonator with TV-B-Gone

came over tonight to assemble one of adafruit Industries TV-B-Gone kits, his first electronics kit. While he did a great job soldering things, it doesn’t work. Why? This one shipped with the 16MHz resonator seen above, instead of the spec’d 8MHz.

At first I thought this might be okay, as a new v1.1 of the kit was released, and I figured that maybe the BOM hadn’t been updated. However, after things didn’t work, I did a bit more digging and realized that it’s just the wrong part. The microcontroller won’t even run at that 16MHz speed, the firmware says that 8MHz is required, etc.

That’s now a total of three kits I’ve ordered from there, two of which had missing parts. I hope I’m the only customer with these issues.

Sorted ICs
(Click for higher resolution image…)

Remember the SOVTEK ICs and random other electronics I received as part of an ITT toolbox from a coworker?

Well, tonight I decided to go through and sort through the ICs, tossing out the noticeably physically damaged ones, and cataloging the rest. That scan up above shows all of the ICs, about half 74xx series, on foam. If you’d like to see a list of what is there, I put it all in Google Documents and shared it here. (And yes, Google Documents works pretty darn well.)

The yellow things are resistor arrays / networks, and those aren’t in the catalog.

Maybe now I can get to putting together that synth-like thing, or something else nifty. (Perhaps a LED clock or something…)