I won a prize in the 555 contest!
I have some great news - I actually won one of the prizes in the 555 design contest!
It is not one of the "main" prizes, but that is hardly surprising
considering the breathtaking 555 designs that some contestants entered.
My prize is MuIn dsNav development board based on Microchip dsPIC33FJ motor controller family. The board was donated to the contest by Droids.it,
which is a manufacturer that makes literally dozens of microcontroller,
communication and peripheral development boards. If you plan to start
some new project and need some headstart, check out their boards.
Now the really weird thing is that I actually may have a use for the MuIn dsNav development board,
despite the fact that I'm an Atmel guy. I have been planning to do
a simple servo controlling application for about two months... and now
I have won a board that is designed to do exactly that! Well, I will
have to ask one of my colleagues to write the firmware in C, because
the only microcontroller programming language I know is Atmel
assembler. But all the hardware is already on the board! Hopefully, the
firmware won't be too complicated to write as I expect that there will
be some motor control libraries bundled with the board. Or even better,
I can try to get some handy student to
do that for me - after all, I work for an university and I'm actually
supposed to bring young (and willing) people to new things! I will keep
you posted about my/his/hers/our progress.
About me
Welcome to my pages!
My name is Pavel Hanak
and I'm employed full-time as an assistant professor at the
Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Brno University of Technology
in the Czech Republic. At the same time, I'm a Ph.D. student at the
same faculty - but to be honest, my attitude towards my Ph.D. studies
is somewhat... complicated. I guess this
webcomic
explains it better than I ever could. Just read a
hundred strips
or so and you will get the idea. Anyway, right now, the only
purpose of these webpages is to present my two entries into this 555 design contest,
but I might add some other stuff in the future.
So
what do I do? Well, I guess I'm just another run-out-of-the-mill
electronics nerd. My specialty is
circuit and hardware design - I have
experience with most types of analog, digital and mixed-signal circuit
design.
In fact, I can design an electronic device from the first idea to
the prototype. I know all basic tools of the trade - PSpice
simulator, schematic and PCB editor, AutoCAD 3D for
mechanical
parts and the like. Of course, I can also work with the usual
assortment of soldering/rework stations, oscilloscopes, logic, spectrum
and network analyzers, signal generators etc. For this reason, I'm head
of Prototype
Design Laboratory
at my faculty and I assist in teaching of Analog
Technology and Design
of Electronic Devices courses. I also do some work
with Lattice CPLDs and
Xilinx FPGAs - mostly just auxiliary logic written in
VHDL,
but I'm working on some more complex designs right now. Some years ago,
I did a little microwave circuit design in Ansoft Designer and
HFSS, but nothing too complicated. I have deep design experience with
many Atmel AVR and AVR32 microcontrollers, but from the programming
standpoint, I'm still stuck in the assembler age (though this is
probably a good thing, because I usually write only fast code chunks
which interface with hardware directly). Software design
generally
is what I can't do properly - I don't know any modern
programming
language, neither for microcontrollers nor for PC). The only exception
is National Instruments LabView, in which I sometimes design automated
testing rigs for my prototypes. But even in this language I don't care
to program properly - my colleagues sometimes cringe when they see
LabView programs I cobbled together. Fortunately, those same colleagues
are very proficient in several programming languages, so they are able
to give (software) life to my hardware designs.
Of course,
I must admit than my work is (still) far from truly
professional, cost-optimized and reliability-optimized
(though nowadays, this means that the product should fail a few months
after the legal warranty period elapses) designs for large-volume
productions. But I'm trying to get there.
Contact
You can use my private e-mail hanak(dot)pavel(at)post(dot)cz
Acknowledgements
Almost
all measurements I made on those 555
contraptions were done with university's instruments and in
university's lab. Moreover, these pages are hosted at university's
server... though when I get sacked for unauthorized use of laboratory
equipment for personal purposes, I might need to look
for another hosting. ;-)
