gSmart Mini Macro Lens

This camera hack is one of those that are easy to make and useful, I had an old gSmart mini camera and a macro lens and the idea was replace the original lens with the macro one and add some white led´s around the lens.
I started by cracking the old lens with a drill (all so needed larger hole) and glued the lens on to the screw, next I cut some foam to hold the white led's frame, this frame was made with copper wire molded on a 2euro coin and weld the led´s on it, finally I glued everything on the foam and secure the foam on the lens

 The led's are powered directly from the usb port because the current draw and easy connection, they are turn on by the power led, the below schematic is an example, since I did this hack some time ago and now I don´t remember the exact components.

As final aspect it didn't look good and is a little fragile and the camera needs to be very stable or the image will get out of focus.

but for a 25euro camera it's not bad I guess

As for the software I used Vision GS private Edition, but any webcam software will do the job.

pro59801 lcd module hack

Currently I´m designing a power supply based on the well known  LM317 voltage regulator and needed a lcd module to show the voltage and current values. Some time ago, a friend give me some PRO59801 pinpad lcd modules which is a module based on the KS0713 controller. The problem is, that this module, has an 8bit parallel interface and I´m using a low pin count pic micro. After reading the KS0713 datasheet, I fount that this controller has a serial interface that can be selected via HW pin, also the controller is on a flex cable that connects the pcb to the glass, a search took me to an BP12864C lcd/controller solution again reading the datasheet found the pin that selects the serial/parallel interface. 

The module with the original connection

1 - GND
2 - VCC
3 - NC
4  - /RST
5  - /CS1
6  - RS
7  - RW_WR
8  - E_RD
9-14  DB0-DB5
DB6 - CLK
DB7 - SID
17 - led+
18 - led-


Originaly the PS pin is connected to VDD by the track marked by the red circule, just needed to cut it and connect the PS pin to GND, luckily the next pin was already conected to GND so only had to make the connection marked by the yellow circule.

Here is the final work

The power supply still is in development this is a test version, todo is the current adjustment and dummy load

extractor

Every electronic lab needs a fumes extractor, so as i don't intend to buy one for the lab i made one, all started when found a "fan blower" from a server system, since this fans are system specific i had to do some reverse engineering, started to open the fan case tho see what was inside, what i found was a very robust system, the fan itself is made from aluminium the board has a nice layout were the air flow cool the power components, as the motor is a brushless i expected to find a brushless controller on the board and also found a pic16f88, the BLDC is a ML4425 with a few control pins that were connected to the pic, so the only thing i had to do was tho write my own control sw, the result was a very powerful fume extractor that work very nice.

Blueboard-LPC1768-H hack

Some time ago I was looking for a nice board for developing, browsing HaD I found review of a cheep cortex-m3 board, pleased with the specs, I order one form NGX site, when the board arrived it looked like this

After uploading a blink program I notice that all led's were a boring red, and replaced one by a green and other by a blue one, also remove the DC input jack since i was planing of using the power from usb port

after that came an lcd wtih messy conections 

navigation buttons

 sd card and accelerometer

and lots of coding, here a 2D minecraft example

for development I'm using a usb bootloader, Code Sourcery G++ lite and programme's notepad.

startup

Well, this is my first attempt on a blog. I decided to start because i'm interested in electronics and notice that most of my projects start with reverse engineering of scraped or unused pcb's and finished with a completed different use. So as i like to see other people projects, i think its nice to share my owns.