Things I might want

[dmaze]

Some things that aren't too expensive that sound potentially interesting or useful, but I'm not necessarily clueful about:

• Headphones. I'd like something comfortable and with reasonable, but not necessarily audiophile-grade, sound quality for work. But I have no idea where to start, or even where to start looking.
• Virtual private server. There seem to be several places online that will sell me a virtual machine for $20/month or less. I could do this, set it up to be a mail/web/blog server, and come up with a domain name. This gets me around feeling vaguely uncomfortable with still using an MIT address as my primary email, plus all of the cool kids have their own domains. Googling "virtual private server" and clicking on the ads is actually useful; any recommendations for a service, or a domain name?
• DigiKey bits. It looks like I can build an extremely low-end DCC controller for my model railroad from a pot, a PIC, and a chip that can take the 5V TTL output from the PIC and send it out to the rails at 12V, up to 1A. I had a part from 6.115 recommended to me, but it's been discontinued.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

For the 5V to 12V stepup, there's a trivial circuit to do this in the old 6.270 manual if you still have that lying around. We used it to do the stepup from on-board 5V/0v to RS-232 10V/-10V. It's a pair of caps and a pair of transistors if I recall correctly. But it might not be able to provide as much current as you want. If you want more current, you could also look in the old 6.270 manual for the motor controllers, though those may have wanted a 12V supply available and just switched it.

Unfortunately, I don't think the modern 6.270 manual has this stuff any more.

[iabervon.livejournal.com]

Digikey seems to have transistors rated for 1A and 20V, if you search for "power transistors". One thing to note is that motors are generally an inductive load, so the capacitors are going to be particularly important.

For the microcontroller, I'd actually suggest an AVR, like the ATmega8. It has the advantage that you can program for it with GCC in C99, and the architecture is very friendly. Plus it has all sorts of nice features, especially if you get crazy ideas like running an I2C bus to send instructions to trains and signals and such.