scottyau

I've been starting to fiddle more and more with electronics of late, and I've realised that at some point I'm going to have to power some stuff off something other than a Arduino/Launchpad etc. In learning about power supplies and the electronics inside them, I've realised there are a lot of options for a bench top supply.  While I definitely plan to have a bit of play (evident from the regulators and other bits that arrived in the mail last week), one starting option was to take an ATX PC power supply and use that as a bench supply.  This will give me the 12v/5v/3.3v I need at the moment - and is pretty cost effective (if you already have the ATX supply).  I looked around at a few examples on the internet (there are heaps!) but the one I like the most was the  Dangerous Prototypes ATX Breakoutboard .  I ordered one from  Seeed Studio  along with an Acrylic Case and waited by the mailbox. The bits turned up last week and I got a chance to sit down ...

So after the last post, I ordered a USB-FTDI adapter and some appropriate jumper cables so I could reprogram the STC12C5620AD.  They took about a week to show up - which brings me to this post. First thing was to solder on a 4 pin header to the clock.  The 4 pins are marked pretty clearly as the ISP header between the hour and minute displays. With that set to one side, it was time to setup the laptop to program this guy.  I first installed the FTDI driver package from the  FTDI site .  I then plugged in the FTDI adapter to find that it wouldn't recognise properly.  I tried unplugging and plugging it back in a few times, as well as different USB ports to no avail.  I then decided to try a different mini usb cable I had and voila - it worked first go.  With the board recognised I had my new serial port to talk to the STC chip on. Next step was to find the software to program this guy.  Thankfully STC now provide an english version of the...