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Motorcycle Universal Gear Indicator

January 27, 2012 by Chris
“This is a new design for a universal gear indicator that can be fitted to any motorcycle as an aftermarket accessory. Its main advantage is that its operation depends entirely on the gear shift lever movement, instead of connecting to speedometer and tachometer sensors....It consists of a main circuit including a 7 segment LED indicator, two Hall sensors that are attached to the motorcycle frame, and a small magnet placed on the gear shift lever.”

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Data Logging Via PIC 16F877A

January 26, 2012 by Chris
“In this project we have used two types of different R.F Module like 433Mhz and 315Mhz Interface into Pic16f877a,HT640 for R.F Encoder,HT648 for R.F Decoder Ic’s.Hence in this we have to use two sensors one is for temperature sensor LM35, another one is potentiometer, the two sensors have an output of analog signal so that analog signal is fed into to two adc channel of pic16f877a and the corresponding digital output is get from the serial port, continuously watching the real time parameter monitoring purposes.”

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Rat Pups And Robots At UC Davis

January 25, 2012 by Chris
“Design and development of robotic rat pups has been an iterative process and is always continuing. The first two generations of robopups we designed and implemented are shown in Figs. 4 and 5. The mechanical design of our robots is motivated by the aim to emulate some of the relevant physical characteristics of rat pups. Characteristics we view as important include scaled rat shape, rat size, rat sensor locations, and rat paws for locomotion.”

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Apple Remote Shield for the Arduino

January 24, 2012 by Chris
“Awhile back I was working on a project that that I wanted to be able to start music the on my mac through the IR receiver. After a while of looking around I found this library which allows you to use your arduino as an Apple Remote. I integrated it in to my project and it worked great! So the other day I decided to make an Apple Remote shield for my arduino.”

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Tic-Tac-Toe Playing Robotic Arm

January 23, 2012 by Chris
“Our project is a twenty four and half inch aluminum frame robotic arm with four degrees of freedom. In our project we made the arm the second player in the classic game of Tic-Tac-Toe to demonstrate its repeatable motion. The arm consists of five servo motors, four to control the motion and one to control the end effecter (gripper). The arm moves tic-tac-toe pieces onto a board for its opponent and itself to give the user interactive control over the arm.”

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Outdoor Motion Sensing Light Controller

January 22, 2012 by Chris
“Those days when I come home at night and straight into the darkness are finally over. This is a very practical device and I built it so that it is a module to my Dual Channel IR Remote Control. Because of that I ended up with a definite overkill of what is supposed to be a simple switch with a timer when I open/close my door. Anyway, it is modular+wireless and that's what I like.”

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Toy Car Inverted Pendulum Balancer

January 21, 2012 by Chris
“The inverted pendulum balancer is a radio controlled car modified by adding a plexiglass platform and an inverted pendulum with free rotating pivot. The electrical component of the balancer brings together computational hardware (Atmel Mega32 MCU), an input angle sensor (US Digital Optical Encoder), and an output motor driver (NI LMD18200 H-Bridge) onto a single board whose sole purpose is to autonomously control the motion of the car in order to keep the pendulum from falling.”

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NES On-A-Chip via FPGA

January 20, 2012 by Chris
“My goal was to implement an older embedded system entirely in VHDL. I chose the NES due to its complexity and variety of subsystems. The idea is to prove that chips can be modeled in VHDL and synthesized on an FPGA to replace either single ICs in old systems or the systems themselves.”

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Fading LEDs via PWM

January 19, 2012 by Chris
A very neat feature that PWM (pulse with modulation) offers is being able to control the brightness level of LEDs. By varying the duty cycle percentage, we can control the exact brightness of any LED. This article takes you through a simple example design step-by-step using a PIC microcontroller. The end result is an LED controller that can set an LED to 100 unique brightness levels.

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Unibot – 3D Stabilization

January 18, 2012 by Chris
“The Unibot is a self balancing unicycle robot. This robot combines the principles of the famous wheeled inverted pendulum and inertia wheel pendulum. A well known application of the wheeled inverted pendulum is the Segway. The wheel on the ground is used to establish the stabilization in the y-z-plane. The wheel in the air is used to balance the robot in the x-z-plane.”

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