Posted March 15, 2014 by Chris

"Mister Gloves is a wireless USB gesture input system that enables a person to use a computer by performing intuitive hand and finger motions in the air. While wearing a glove controller on the right hand, the user can move the cursor by forming a pointing gesture and click by curling the index finger or thumb."

Posted March 13, 2014 by Chris

Today we’re happy to announce that lesson 1 of our new course: An Introduction To Microcontrollers is live. Here’s an overview of the lesson:

"Want to learn about microcontrollers? Please start here! This lesson explains the course content, what expectations you should have and what parts are needed for the course."

Posted March 12, 2014 by Chris

"A PID controller is like a kind of fancy thermostat, but can be used to control pretty much any kind of process, not just heating and cooling. This project was inspired by the osPID and its design is greatly indebted to that pioneering device."

Posted March 11, 2014 by Chris

"The mood that the ‘Magic Crystal Mood Ball’ gives to the user is based on measuring his temperature and changing the color of the RGB LED to the its respective color. As in a mood ring, I set different colors for different temperatures. The temperatures coincides with mood state that the person is in."

Posted March 10, 2014 by Chris

"Driving a shift register using an AVR chip’s built-in hardware is really quite easy. Most of their offerings have an SPI module, or Serial Peripheral Interface. A shift register is exactly that, a peripheral device that communicates via a serial line. All we need to do is hook up our connections and use a few pieces of simple code. Join me after the break to see how that’s done."

Posted March 9, 2014 by Chris

"This January my daughter decided that she wanted to join in her brother’s cub pack’s Pinewood derby with a replica of Doctor Who’s TARDIS on wheels. Her design was pretty straightforward – balsa wood trim, poster paint, paper cutouts for the windows and sign, and her construction was quickly nearing completion…."

Posted March 8, 2014 by Chris

"For a long time, I was looking for a solution to the size of my stk500. Its big, fragile, and requires external power and a large USB to serial cable. It seemed like the solution was one of these, a tiny (haha) programmer based around an attiny45/48. Since I had the parts left over from The Secret Knowledge (more on this later) that would let me implement v-usb, and some attiny45 in my room, I decided to give it a shot. Along the way there were a few roadblocks:"

Posted March 7, 2014 by Chris

"We have discussed in the past experiments how to use a PIC microcontroller to do a variety of things from flashing an LED to driving a motor, etc. Today, we will see how to play notes of a song with a PIC microcontroller. Musical notes are simply sound waves of particular frequencies."

Posted March 5, 2014 by Chris

"Last time I went through junk in the basement I found old ZX spectrum.This was the time I got the great idea. Have the ZX spectrum implemented in FPGA…..As for the hardware part I had this SparkFun’s Spartan 3 breakout board. 500k gate FPGA that should be big enough most home made projects."

Posted March 4, 2014 by Chris

"I have decided to do a small hardware project to get my feet wet, a project that I will fully document and discuss here with the hope to encourage and motivate others to do the same: Building an Arduino Robot."