Posted September 28, 2013 by Chris

"I have a few old N64 controllers lying around and figured that it would be pretty cool to use them to control other things. In this article I will describe in detail every step I took to achieve this. I’ve used a PIC microcontroller, but it should not be too hard to port the code to any other architecture."

Posted September 27, 2013 by Chris

"This is a quick guide with a bit of extra info that I’ve learnt along the way on how to use the L293D with the Arduino, showing that we can: A) Use a supplemental power source to power the DC motor, B) Use the L293D chip to drive the motor, C) Use a switch to change the direction of the motor."

Posted September 26, 2013 by Chris

It’s that time again! We’re releasing another lesson on PyroEDU for our Analog Electronics course. This week the lesson is about Passive Analog Filters. Here’s a quick intro of what this PyroEDU lesson is all about:

The most basic passive analog filter comes by combining together a resistor and a capacitor or a resistor and an inductor. In this lesson we are going to learn how to build and design some basic RC and RL filters and see the effect of these filters on a simple audio signal.

Posted September 25, 2013 by Chris

"An adventure of the Southern Appalachian Space Agency, by Travis Goodspeed, as presented at Summercon 2013, inspired by the lectures of Adam Laurie and Jim Geovedi, with kind assistance from Skytee."

Posted September 24, 2013 by Chris

"I decided to explore the more advanced features of XBee radios by building a remote temperature sensor. You can get quite a bit of control over an XBee radio without a microcontroller at all. You can configure the radio to send sensor readings at particular intervals when it detects changes on certain input pins."

Posted September 23, 2013 by Chris

The Beavis offers everything you need to wire up 25 sound-shaping circuits, from parts to multi-meter to integrated breadboard. The OpenStomp Coyote takes a different approach, with a programmable processor and Windows visual patching software.

Posted September 22, 2013 by Chris

Here is another twist on the POV clock idea, a POV globe. Although project details are sparse, the creater of this awesome POV glove has put up many detailed photos of his design along with videos of it in action to give you a feel for how it works. A very interesting project!

Posted September 21, 2013 by Chris

“Using an add-on card to the already existing avr ethernet board we build a weather station. That is: A weather station with a build-in webserver…The system is modular. You can either build a pure Ethenet weather station or an Ethenet weather station with an additional local LCD display.”

Posted September 20, 2013 by Chris

“I have always wanted to create a VGA generator. It has been a personal goal of mine for some time. Over the past couple of weeks I toyed with the idea and finally decided to implement one. I decided to implement it as a framebuffer to allow for general purpose display rather than application specific display. I implemented my own small colour gamut to be memory and CPU efficient.”

Posted September 19, 2013 by Chris

This week at PyroEDU we’re going to be adding another lesson to the Analog Electronics course, called Zener Diodes. Here’s a quick intro of what this PyroEDU lesson is all about:

The zener diode is a special type of diode that allows current to flow through it in either direction, however only at certain voltages. In this lesson we will learn how zener diodes affect AC and DC signals and perform some experiments to see those effects.