Posted December 3, 2012 by Chris

Good news everyone!

We began a Kickstarter last week to fund new camera equipment, lighting equipment, editing software, and electronics parts for PyroEDU’s second online course: An Introduction To Digital Electronics. This equipment and software will improve the quality of videos and pictures on not only PyroEDU, but also on all future articles across the entire PyroElectro.com site.

We need your help to make this dream a reality! We have developed a strategy for achieving our goal: Each and every day, PyroElectro.com sees an average of 2,500 unique visitors. If each person gives $2, we’ll have completed our goal in just one day! Your contributions don’t need to be large if we can all work together. Please stop by our Kickstarter page and show your appreciation and support. If you simply cannot give any monetary amount, you can still contribute to our cause by telling your friends, co-workers, and peers to help contribute to something you’re passionate about.

Find out more at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pyroelectro/open-education-an-introduction-to-digital-electron

Posted December 2, 2012 by Chris

“In this article, I want to take you through the process of creating your own hardware project. I hope it can serve as an example that working in hardware can be an approachable and a fun hobby for people that are already smart enough to know how to code.”

Posted December 1, 2012 by Chris

“This project has been an astonishing little journey. Many of my previous projects were characterized by an amazing outpouring of effort to build something highly intricate and ultimately invisible…A little bit of work and a little custom design to create something new and exciting that I can immediately use in my everyday life. It also happens to be a sex toy.
In other words, I wanted to hack something I actually use: my vagina.”

Posted November 30, 2012 by Chris

“My project is a standalone MIDI controller with 4 memory banks. It has a USB and a MIDI connection. I engineered this device to play/control Virtual Instruments, mixers and sound effects. If you are not familiar with MIDI technology, you just need to remember one thing, this device does not alter wave forms like a mixer, and it does not produce any sound like a synthesizer; instead it sends MIDI events which can be assigned to adjust certain settings, play notes or trigger samples within other hardware/software.”

Posted November 29, 2012 by Chris

Everyone seems to already be familiar with LEDs, however you need to understand what basic diodes are and how they operate before you can make the leap to understanding LEDs. This lesson uses both standard diodes and LEDs to perform some experiments, explain what diodes are and to understand why we use them. So if you’re ready, start learning – Lesson 6: The Diode.

We’re still running our kickstarter campaign to secure funding for the next course: An Introduction To Digital Electronics, so if you haven’t already, take a look at our plan and help us out!

Posted November 28, 2012 by Chris

“A major focus of the SoundPuddle project right now is building a new circuit board to run the installation and carry it through the next two years. The installation is controlled by a Papilio FPGA, which connects the other parts of the system – the microphone and audio input hardware, the flash memory, and control hardware for the LED strips. The Zpuino, a softcore running inside the FPGA, handles most of the logic for the system.”

Posted November 27, 2012 by Chris

“For the past two days I have literally lost my patience with Qik 2s9v1 dual serial motor controller. I have referred so many website and I could not make this controller work. After hours of searching I found this library which was compatible with Arduino 1.0…..Once that got the issue resolved I jumped into controlling the motor using a Proximity Sensor.”

Posted November 26, 2012 by Chris

Given the success thus far of PyroEDU’s first course, An Introduction To Modern Electronics, we are excited to get started on the next course: An Introduction To Digital Electronics. We want to not only continue providing free education about electronics, but also improve the quality and craftsmanship of our content. With this goal in mind, we are seeking your help in acquiring new film and lighting equipment, as well as higher quality electronics parts, to produce better quality videos at a faster rate and offer more experiments and real-world examples in our lessons. We are adamant these lessons be open to the world and free of advertisements so we need your support to fund this project. Your contributions may lead today’s young minds to become tomorrow’s great innovators!

Posted November 25, 2012 by Chris

“The piano box is a (somewhat polyphonic) paper toy synthesizer with 12 keys, each triggering a tone and an LED. The keys are a set of capacitive sensors, made of copper tape, controlled by an Arduino Mega running the CapSense and Tone libraries.”

Posted November 24, 2012 by Chris

“The goal of my project was to design and implement a mobile robot that can be controlled wirelessly using speech as a user interface. This was my first mobile robot which I built by forking concepts from here and there. I tried to follow open standards and use opensource hardware and software components wherever possible.”