Posted July 12, 2014 by Chris

"I did some more scrounging to create a mini Locnar using the LEDs from a Glade Light Show air freshener. The wall wart had previously been scrounged from this air freshener for the bread board power supply. Now we reuse part of the circuit board with the LEDs combined with what we learned in the Ping Pong Ball diffuser project to create a color changing orb."

Posted July 11, 2014 by Chris

"This is a conduction tester to check the connection on the built proto-board. Normally a circuit tester is used to check the conduction. But it is not suitable to check if wired or not in the circuit board with mounted parts because the semiconductor parts in the circuit become conductive under test voltage."

Posted July 8, 2014 by Chris

"The purpose of this project was to design and implement a digital stethoscope to serve as a platform for potential computer aided diagnosis applications for the detection of cardiac murmurs. The system uses a custom-built sensor to capture heart sounds at 8 kHz and converts them to electrical signals to be processed by an ATmega644 microcontroller."

Posted July 7, 2014 by Chris

"My first Physical Computing class assignment for this summer was to create a bicycle computer. This is a device that you stick on your bike and it tells you how fast you are going, what your speed is, etc. Following is how I made my own bicycle computer."

Posted July 5, 2014 by Chris

"Each anchor is connected to a motorshield via Ethernet cables and the shield is mounted to an Arduino. I located a copy of the firmware on Github and started editing it with AVR Studio. Once I implemented the necessary geometry modifications, I used a program called XLoader to flash the new firmware over to the Atmel chip."

Posted July 3, 2014 by Chris

This week we’re moving on to Lesson 2: Hardware Hello world in our new PyroEDU course: An Introduction to CPLD and FPGA. Here’s an overview of the lesson:

"Building a ‘hello world’ application signifies a time honored approach to learning how to program. In this lesson, we will explore the first steps necessary for building and loading images onto a CPLD."

Posted July 2, 2014 by Chris

"The MiniPOV uses only a single PIC16F630 while the spoke uses an Amtel micro-controller, an EEPROM, and several 74×259 8-bit latches. I wanted to enhance the MiniPOV to display text on both sides of the bike wheel. I chose to use Microchip’s PIC because they sold a cheap programmer.."

Posted June 30, 2014 by Chris

"Contact-less measurement of RPM will be achieved through an IR sensor. An IR diode will send a beam of infrared towards the rotating disc, and any reflected pulse will be received by a photo diode. The resistance of a photo diode drops drastically when exposed to infrared. An infrared is reflected by a white surface and absorbed by the dark ones."

Posted June 29, 2014 by Chris

"Here we will discuss The ‘JTAG’ IEEE 1532 standard used for ‘ISP’ (In-System-Programming) I will also talk about Atmel’s ‘AVR ISP’ programmer and it’s ‘SPI’ (Serial-Peripheral-Interface)."

Posted June 28, 2014 by Chris

"This article explores the suitability of a Wii nunchuk based USB accelerometer as an earthquake sensor for the Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) project. It examines the nunchuk over several metrics: precision and range, frequency response, total cost and availability."