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DIY Remote Control Based On PIC

Posted September 15, 2012 by Chris

“Control up to 8 devices by this easy constructable remote control. It can work as a radio or infrared remote control, depending on the components. Each device output can be configured to be momentary (turned on while you press the button) or latched. Latched outputs can be toggled on/off by one button per channel, or turned on and off by two buttons per channel.”

4-Input Mini Logic Analyzer

Posted September 14, 2012 by Chris

“This mini Logic analyzer is a tool for you to watch on LCD the logic transitions 0 or 1 of a digital data signal. A digital data signal can be found on the output pin of TSOP-1730 Infrared Receiver, on the Transmit and reveive pins of MAX-232 chip (RS-232), on Clock and Data pins of I2C data bus and many more electronic components. This circuit supports capturing for up to 100 kHz digital signals.”

Arduino Servo Motor Controller

Posted September 13, 2012 by Chris

“We have already explored how to control a servo motor using a PIC microcontroller, but this time let’s take a look at how to control a servo motor using the Arduino platform. We’re not trying to do anything extra-ordinary in this article, just trying to make the servo motor move to the specific angle that we want it to be at and stay there.”

Measuring Projectile Velocity

Posted September 12, 2012 by Chris

“So being the EE that I am, this got me to thinking: wouldn’t this be even more fun if we could measure muzzle velocity? It shouldn’t be all that hard; we could just hook up a couple LEDs and photo-detectors, fire through the beams, time it with a microcontroller, and voila! So, that’s precisely what I did, except that I decided to go with a couple cheap laser diodes instead of LEDs.”

Magnetic Lego Whiteboard Eraser Robot

Posted September 11, 2012 by Chris

“Despite the fact that it is a really simple and cheap design, I really love this creation of a magnetic whiteboard eraser bot that’s built with Lego parts and a simple Atmel microcontroller, which acts as brain controller. Le Zhang and Michael Lathrop, both senior students at Cornell had this nice idea how to efficiently clean your professor’s whiteboard.”

Creating A Physical Version of the DIY Calculator

Posted September 10, 2012 by Chris

“Although the virtual DIY Calculator is lots of fun, there is something satisfying about having a real machine to play with, so we’ve been pondering the idea of creating a physical version of the DIY Calculator…”

Measuring Battery Capacity With An Arduino

Posted September 9, 2012 by Chris

“My idea was really simple: I would make a circuit that would fully discharge each of the batteries while measuring how much energy it produced…I had an Arduino and an LCD panel left over from a different project so I thought I’d make a standalone unit.”

Explorations In Conductive Ink

Posted September 8, 2012 by Chris

“I’ve recently had success in making a conductive ink using a fine copper powder suspended in an acrylic airbrush medium. This paper on conductive epoxies was really the key to getting this ink working….There is still quite a bit of experimentation to be done, but this is a very encouraging result!”

SPI Interface Big 7-Seg LED

Posted September 7, 2012 by Chris

“Easy build and use, the general purpose Big LED with SPI serial interfacing. Expandable for multiple digits but still uses only three wires for receiving data from any uC boards.”

An Arduino Outputting VGA Signals

Posted September 6, 2012 by Chris

“In the past I have built many, many VGA based projects,, but never with Arduino and so, in this article, we will use the Arduino UNO platform to simulate VGA signals using straight C code. This doesn’t even come close to how video card designers do it, but it’s a fun exercise in seeing how well we understand the timing of the Arduino and AVR microcontroller as well as the VGA protocol.”