Here at Helicron is a bunch of stuff that you may not care about but we do.
Microcontrollers
For many electronics projects a microcontroller is now an essential component. Replacing any amount of digital discrete devices and more than a few analogue ones, it seems that they are often the first thing folk think of when designing some new gadget.After a brief dabble with PICs and older chips like the 8051 series and the 80C196, I did a bit of work with the atmel AVR devices. These are a delight to use. Soone enough, 8 bits starts to look a bit constraining and thoughts turn to bigger and better things.
While giving more than passing thought to the 32 bit ARM processors, I have currently decided to use the 16 bit Renesas H8/tiny series - particularly the H8/3664 and H8/3687 - for some projects. You will find what I hope is enough information here to get you started with these devices.
Workshop
Building small robots seems to require making any number of small parts. These are easiest if you have some handy machine tools. Having persuaded myself that there was any number of ither things they would be useful for, I acquired a lathe and a small milling machine. I have a lot of pleasure from learning how to do even the most simple of tasks with these machines so I have added some bits and pieces of information about them to these pages.
Web Page Development
One way or another, the web has become vital to the operation of just about everything from simple messaging and information retrieval to international commerce. For some time, it has not been enough to knock out a bit of HTML in a text editor. Web applications are sophisticated beasts with 'proper' programming behind them running on servers. Most of the logic behind a site will require server-side scripting. Most popular for these tasks are PHP and ASP or ASP .NET technologies. On this site there are some odd bits and pieces either for my reference or because they seem generally useful.
