News & Articles

623

Free Robotics Guide

Get started making your own robotics with this guide from the Pyros! Send Me My Free Guide!

Categories

Sponsors

Build Like A Pyro!
Find many of the parts used on this site at our favorite online electronics shop
Take Me To The Gadgetory!


MCM Electronics Daily Deal and Bulk Bargain

LAN Controlled Stereo Audio Switch

Posted May 20, 2013 by Chris

“I needed an idea that I could use to teach myself about using a relay with Microcontrollers and solve that age old problem: Switching between speakers and headphones on my PC without having to actually get up and mess around in the rats nest of wire’s behind it.”

Poor Man’s Single Transistor Audio Amp

Posted May 19, 2013 by Chris

“This amplifier will work great with the crystal radio project. It will enable you to pull in weaker and more distant stations. Local strong stations will have extremely loud volume.”

Junk + Arduino = Robot #2

Posted May 18, 2013 by Chris

“This was the second robot I made for collective motion research purposes. As you can see, it is vastly simpler, cheaper and easier to build. Of course it doesn’t have nearly as many features or as much potential as robot 1, but I think it is much better for what I’m trying to do. Here’s a picture of the prototype without the battery.”

Eternal Free-Swinging Pendulum

Posted May 17, 2013 by Chris

“This is the dedicated page about our first kit project – Eternal Free-swinging Pendulum, also known as Omni Pendulum. It’s a long and detailed story…”

Design A 4-Bit Counter

Posted May 16, 2013 by Chris

This week, we’re looking at binary counters! Specifically, we’re going to look at how to Design A 4-Bit Binary Counter. Here’s a quick intro of what this PyroEDU lesson is all about:

A great strength of digital circuitry is that the clock can act as a timer or counter with appropriate flip-flop circuitry in place. In this lesson, using some LEDs, we will learn how to build a 4-bit binary counter that uses the clock input to tell our circuit to increment a counter with every clock period.

This online course is also be available through:
uRedditP2PU

Electronic Distance Meter

Posted May 15, 2013 by Chris

“This project demonstrates the use of 16×1 line LCD module to interface with Nitron 16-pin MCU, 68HC908QY4. The original idea came from one evening I went out with my son to the park near my home in Korat. The park has a nice walking way for people to exercise. I was wondering how long the distance is?”

Spoke Ink – Persistance of Vision for your Bike

Posted May 14, 2013 by Chris

“Take your MSP430 for a spin with Spoke Ink! Spoke Ink is a booster pack that attaches to the spokes of your bicycle wheel. Using an array of 32 RGB LEDs and a magnetic sensor, this booster pack projects a bright, upright image right from the spokes of your wheel. Using our software, you can create this image from any bitmap.”

5^3 LED CUBE Controller

Posted May 13, 2013 by Chris

“The cube described on this page uses a 5 x 5 x 5 matrix of single colour LEDs. This is a good size to experiment with as the number of LEDs required at 125 keeps the cost down, doesn’t take too long to assemble and just fits onto a eurocard sized PCB. The power requirement is under 1 amp and the use of just one colour keeps both the hardware construction and control software fairly simple.”

Brute Force Attack A BIOS With Arduino

Posted May 12, 2013 by Chris

“The goal of this experiment is to convert the Arduino board into an USB keyboard plus a VGA sniffer to crack the password of a standard BIOS using the brute force attack method. There are no advantages in using this method, in fact this can be very slow and you may never find the password at all, but as always we do it for fun.”

Sensing Squeeze

Posted May 11, 2013 by Chris

“I’m researching squeeze sensing as a mode of tactile interface. Here I will cover the process of developing a squeezeable sensor and the firmware/software concerns associated with interpreting the data from the sensor.”