People love to do different types of activities to kill off their spare time. Some of them enjoy singing with the Karaoke, even they’re dreaming themselves can turn into a singing superstar, just like those ordinary people in the reality shows, “American Idol” or “America’s Got Talent”!

Well, it’s good to dream big, as it’s one of the momentum to keep us go as far as possible. By the way, if singing is your favorite hobby, maybe you should consider building a Karaoke and Audio processor!

It isn’t too hard to develop this project. However, you should know the concept of it first. For your information, this project consists of hardware and software parts. The hardware parts included the Zilog Z8 Encore Evaluation Board and an analog processing board. These components are for conditioning the input analog waveform and processing the PWM output from the Zilog Z8 Encore Evaluation Board.

In other hand, the software was developed on the XTools ZDS II IDE. It consist a set of signal processing routines, which allows it to provide features desired in a typical Karaoke environment, such as video echo, voice reverb and pitch transformation within one switch.

If you’re a talented singer, you should have this device to assist you during your singing session. So, it’s time to get your hands on and build this project!

Do you need some help or assistance when you’re dealing with the electronic projects? Isn’t it frustrated and annoyed, if you cannot find the proper testing tool, especially you’re in the middle of a project? In this case, all you need here is a multilab, but it would be better, if you can create the multilab by your own hand!

Theoretically, the multilab is a multipurpose lab test instrument. It has fully equipped with these following components, such as:

• An Arbitrary function generator,
• A digital pulse generator,
• A high-resolution DC voltmeter, and
• A DC reference source.

If you’re suggesting to cut down the cost, then you might want to eliminate the conventional “front panel” and substitute it with a Palm Pilot PDA. In this case, you can keep the whole project’s size becoming even smaller and inexpensive than before.

In addition, the Z8 Encore’s DMA channels are also an ideal component for the ‘arb function’, where is allow the irDA encoder/decoder block to implement the IR link to the Palm Pilot much easier and faster!

By the way, the Palm Pilot application supports both RS-232 and irDA communications links, making the multilab becomes a useful and better tool.

When someone talking about “ham”, most people will react that it must be related with the foods! Well, you might be right most of the time, but you got it wrong this time. This Ham Radio Repeater Locator has nothing to do with the “ham”, but it is much important for detecting the locations and communication purposes!

Do you know that over the years, the amateur radio “ham” community has successfully built numerous repeaters at many strategic locations all across the United States and worldwide? These repeaters allow the amateurs to communicate over in a longer distance, by using the normally line-of-sight two-meter amateur band, which it mostly from 144 MHz to 148 MHz!

It would be an ultimate fun experience to have a 2-meter long transceiver in the car, especially when you’re driving in long distance. The Ham Radio Repeater Locator is consists a “ZiLOG” microcomputer with the accurate locations and frequencies of several thousand repeaters. All the data are being stored safely in its flash memory.

This is how the Ham Radio Repeater Locator works: First of all, the system displays the distance to the nearest eight repeaters, and a detail line is used to show the frequency and PL tone for the selected repeater. After it, an optional interface is going to program the Ham radio transceiver scan memory, where it automatically scans for the nearest repeaters. In the very end, it tries to eliminating the need for the operator and it manually tune the radio as new repeaters come into range.