Hi, yes, it's mail bag time again where I open my mail people just send me stuff random stuff and I'm got to open it here. So I got five items actually. let's check it out. First one is Circuit Seller.

no surprise I know exactly what's in here. Get out the trusty Swiss Army Knife it should be. Everyone has heard of Circuit Seller so no surprise which includes your interview on behalf of Circuit Seller, Audio Amateur, and Elector Us Staff in Veran Connecticut I Want to thank you for your contribution Hello to all my viewers in Vernon Connecticut if there are any I don't know how big's Vernon Connecticut no idea There you go and uh oh I Got two copies. Brilliant! I'm in the April Edition There you go, Circuit Seller Magazine I uh uh, don't get a print copy of this I've never got gotten uh a print copy I've always gotten the digital copy of this so this is some real paper.

April 2012 Let's open it up and have a look. T there I am Tada Who's that ugly guy? Unbelievable what they let him in here for 22 Page 22 and there it is. there's my interview. Electronics Engineering for the people, The People's Engineer.

go figure. There's inside my old uh clock home. BR clock homebuilt clock. There's the uh, famous photo of me with the multimeters and there we go.

I Got three full Pages four four pages out of that. There you go. Go figure. right in there with the uh microchip stuff.

Huge full page microchip ad I wonder how much they pay for that? Ah, there you go. I didn't have to pay a Cent and I got four pages worth. Brilliant! Love it. So there you go.

If you want to read my article, get the latest copy of Circuit Seller Now the next one is pure spam. I Get this all the time. So I know what's in here. It's from the domain renewal group.

a bunch of predatory bastards who, uh, who get your name from the uh who is uh' list on Uh domains and they offer to uh renew your domain at a ridiculously inflated price and they ship out, uh, probably millions of these. Oh, it's uh, they're actually in Australia now I don't think they used to be in Australia I might send it back to them in their reply paid, ah, it's not reply. paid a fix postage here. screw that.

Anyway, what they do is um, they, uh, there you go, Osc Canyon.org They're saying oh, it's expired yada yada yada so they're making it out to be that, um, they're they're well, they're pra on the fact that you know you don't know, uh, anything about domain renewal and you you'll go out of business if you let your domain expire and it's one year for 45 bucks. You got to be kidding me I Pay about five bucks a year and that's like the going rate. If you're paying anything more than 10, you're getting ripped off, You're getting shafted. So there you go.

I Hate this mob. Um I think they used to be more than that. Actually, maybe they're not getting enough bites now. but oh I Hate them.

They just H A and the next one here is from Energy Micro I Was expecting this one I think they've uh, sent me a Dev board. They emailed me and said they would send one. So uh, let's crack this sucker open and see what's inside Tada The EFM 32 starter kit. It's a 32bit uh uh.

microcontroller? really? uh, low energy? 1 apparently. Um, so that looks. let's have a look at that attention. They got it in a nice static shielding bag.

I Like that, well done and uh o. it's got an LCD on it. Lovely. Excellent.

There we go. We've got a uh, it's the Tiny Gecko love the name the Efm32 Tiny Gecko board and if we take a closer look at that, we've got a CR um 2032 battery there. We've got a Uh Jlink uh I think that's a debugger? um SL programming interface. Oh no, there's a debug in Out and it's got a light sensor.

There we go and uh, a couple of switches and there's the AFM 32 micro pain the Ass package. But uh, it's got a touch slider. It's got one of those uh, capacitive um slider one so you can slide your finger along there and uh, you can decode that in software. It's got a 32 khz Crystal on there and uh few other miscellaneous devices all mounted under the LCD there.

Excellent. Supply With the USB cable, you get the IR and the I embedded. uh uh. workbench um C compiler presumably like it.

that's use the code limited to like, you know, 32k or something like that. Don't quote me on that, but that's a lot of pink. Ah, nothing. nothing.

Not a sausage at least I got, uh, some bubble wrap to uh to pop? not ah, can't even pop this stuff. It's hopeless. and no, nothing. It's just padding comes from.

uh Norway by the way, came all the way from. where is it Norway Beautiful hi to all my viewers in Norway Now check out the back of the board here: I Rather like this, they've actually gone and put the schematic of the opamp there with the footprints uh used so that you can, uh, solder in the various components in there to presumably use an Op amp on the top side. Really like that. It's rather neat, but uh, uh, if you don't know about the Um energy uh, micro boards, the EFM uh, the chips, the EFM 32 range there.

ultra low power uh, 32bit micros uh 80 microamps per meah megahertz execution uh 900 nanoamps in deep sleep mode? whatever deep sleep mode means. Presumably that means with the real time clock still uh going and 20 nanoamps in shut off mode whatever shut off is, that's presumably doing absolutely nothing I don't know if that has wake up on interrupt or anything. uh like that. Uh, check out the data sheet if you want further details, but 4 to 32k uh, flash memory 1 to 4 KOB SRAM and uh, it's got a built-in LCD controller as you'd expect uh, four time, uh, 24 uh segments and the LCD controller itself only uses 900 nanoamp.

So if you're after a low power micro, oh, check them out, they're worth a look. and uh, this board. This tiny GE Gecko development board runs for about 74 bucks and you can get it from Uh Mousa and Digi key too I think so it's not bad value and they've partnered up with Sega and that's what the Uh Jlink USB header is there. It's the Sega uses the Sega Jlink debugger.

That's the tiny Geo Oh, can't they put like a little picture of a gecko on the board or something like that? That would have been really cool. Look, there's plenty of room on the bottom side to put a gecko. Instead, they just put their n and they just put the the free crap. Eh, who cares I want an animal on the board because we get a nice looking H gecko on the box here.

but why not put that on the silk screen? Come on. Now this one here is H Interesting. It looks like it's h been through the wars here. It's A.

It's a little bit beat up and it contains a do-it-yourself Electronics kit worth well presumably 9 or that could just be the uh thing they put on the worth. They put on the Customs form and uh, it's from deut post. Love the Germans Hi to all my German viewers I I think you're the third or fourth, uh, highest. Got a huge contingent of viewers in Germany and it comes from ah I cannot read that and I'm not even going to try and pronounce it anyway.

thank you very much. So let's crack this thing open. I Have no idea what uh this one is. so this one is a uh, this one is a random.

It's uh, nice silver tape there. rather like that. All right here we go. Got some paper? Have we got a German newspaper? We do? There we go.

my German uh. viewers will no doubt be able to read that because I can't uh part from guten tag? That's about all I know. So there you go: I have no idea what paper that that is. It's the dur I'm not even going to pronounce it I cannot pronounce stuff I'm hopeless.

So there you go. Got some paper hi Dave thanks for uh I can't read the handwriting. thanks for uh, something about Kead? No worries, have fun with this toy with oh let me open it. oh there's a oh CD If everything else far you can at least use it at the H All the I can't read your handwriting sorry works with Arduino IDE Cool.

Oh look, oh what do we have here? Hey, this looks nice. We' got surface mount parts. Excellent! 100 Microfarad. See, this is the thing Um, people always talk about.

Why don't I do a surface mount kit or something like that? And this is why. Because you have to individually cut or tape or label or something these individual surface mount parts because they're a pain in the ass. I Mean you know there's no markings on these surface mount caps, right? So you've got to, um, just uh. You know you've got to separate them into a bag and then identify them and it's it's just yeah.

it's just too much hassle. Excellent 250 C Max towards center of the board. awesome little 0805 diodes. Put them around once.

Sorry for the mess. The AVR is uh, pre-programmed with a little demo. Cool. Please connect to a sound serial.

uh. Terminal 96 Board 8 Na not Arduino ID Awesome! So that's this little board here. let's check it out. This is great.

Some nice little Hardware here. Oh wa whoa. We've got chips and all sorts of things flying out here. Hang on.

This could be messy. Yeah, there's there's chips and other stuff in there and this is a, uh, rather cute looking, uh cute looking board. I Like it. Not sure what it does.

Blog: There we go. Blog: Spits and.org Thank you very much. There's the address, so check it out. Blog: Spitsen if I'm pronouncing Spitz and.org if I'm pronouncing that correctly I'll put the link up so that uh, you can put it in and it's obviously some sort of little AVR demo board.

Lost In Time surround by evil and low on gas. What's that? a quote from Lost in Time surrounded by evil and low on gas. it sounds like a quote from something I'm not sure I not aware of that one, but if anyone is, please let me know. I have to check it out and there's the other uh, other parts in there.

the LEDs with the uh little surface mount AVR micro. he pre-programmed that so must have one of those um, must have one of those uh uh, Z sockets to handle the Plcc uh 28 package there. So there you go. What else have we got? And the CD is uh, presumably.

yep. software so excellent. Thanks for that. sorry I can't uh, pronounce your first name later but thank you very much from Spiten Field.

Org. That's brilliant. I'll have to build that up and uh, see what it does. That'll be fun.

That's a nice therapeutic board to build I think it's kind of lots of therapy in that, lots of satisfaction I Love round boards. They're neat, brilliant. thank you very much. And this just arrived this afternoon and I know exactly what it is.

microcurrents Woohoo! I've got 50 apparently 50 assembled. uh microcurrents? I know I had 200 manufactured but uh, they won't be ready until um, early next week. but they said they'd ship me uh 50 and uh Tada Here we go. there's the boards.

Ah, these bloody foam peanuts. Let's see if I can get them out without spilling the foam peanuts. T they uh, left them on the panels. Excellent.

And there we go. There's my completed microcurrent boards. Awesome! look at. they look neat on the panel.

I'll put them down and we'll get a closeup of them. And this is my new panel from Uh Circuit Labs in New Zealand and it looks very nice indeed. I like it EV log microcurrent because I uh added the Eev blog on there as you might know, seems to be no issue with the Uh construction there at all I can't see any component, uh, loading issues. but uh, I guess we won't know until we fire one of these up.

and that means I've got to break these out of the panel Now ordinarily, you use a uh, a cutter on here to actually uh, like a wheeled cutter to go along and uh, slice these off. but uh, we don't have that. So next best thing is just to give them a little little wiggle like that and uh, that should. They should break off fairly easily without doing too much well, without doing any damage To the Uh to the rest of the board.

There we go. Snapped off pretty easy and uh, then once you've got these ends off, you can, uh, leverage the full board there to give it a little bit of a wiggle and off it comes. And that's the uh beauty of the V scoring. And now it's quite.

uh. now it's quite wobbly. It's uh, you can do the old Ral Harris wobble board thing. There you go.

Maybe I can do timey Kangaroo Down Sport timey kangaroo down all together now timey Kangaroo Down Sport Okay, I'll uh, spare the Yanks that. So let's uh, see if we can, then take a board and snap it off easy. Not a problem. There you go.

There's the before shot and the after shot. This is the new Uh circuit Labs New Zealand board and uh, I rather like it I like the bigger font. it's got Evv blog on the front and it's a more metallic, uh shiny face on it I think it's rather neat I like it and does it work I've whacked a battery in there and uh, Hey the LED comes on. That's a good start at least the battery detection voltage works and the Nano amp range Works No problems at all.

I'm feeding in 100 Nano amps and pretty darn close. and the micro amp range. look at it spot on. and I'm feeding in 99.9 milliamps and the milliamp range pretty darn close.

to spot on to awesome I Declare this one to be a winner. So there you go. That's the Eev blog mailbag I Hope you like that one. And if you want to, uh, send me stuff, please do.

Here's the address: P Box Uh 7949 Borham Hills New South Wales 2153 Ustra Australia not Austria Okay, get it right and uh yeah, um by all means send me stuff and I'll open it on air Can be anything bizarre I don't care. Send it, catch you next time.