Posted April 28, 2013 by Chris

“I put together this Pong demo as an exercise to help get more familiar with Verilog, and gain some experience working with the Xilinx tools and the Spartan 3A FPGA starter kit. It was very slow going at first, but things are slowly beginning to make sense to me now. And hey, I’ve got Pong!!”

Posted April 27, 2013 by Chris

“Evertool is an AVRISP/STK500-protocol and JTAGICE compatible Programmer/JTAG debugger. It has the following features: ISP Programmer compatible with Atmel AVRISP, directly accessable with AVRStudio and avrdude. JTAG debugger compatible with Atmel JTAGICE, directly accessable with AVRStudio and AVaRice. Simple hardware, standard parts.”

Posted April 26, 2013 by Chris

“As shown in the schematic, temperature sensor of our electronic thermometer is LM35DZ. There are some kinds of LM35 IC, since it is cheap and easy to find we used LM35DZ in our project. It measures from 0°C to 100°C with a very linear output graph. For one degree change, it increases its output 10mV.”

Posted April 25, 2013 by Chris

It is time for a new PyroEDU lesson in our Introduction To Digital Electronics course and it’s called Digital Flip Flops. Here is what this week’s lesson is all about:

To take another gigantic step into the world of digital electronics, we need to learn about flip-flops. In this lesson we take a look at two types of the flip-flops, the JK and D flip-flops. To learn what they are and how they work, we will put them in some experimental circuits and see how they react. Additionally, we will start to learn about digital clock signals.

Posted April 24, 2013 by Chris

“One of the great aspects of the logic is the speed and the full control of what happens at every single clock cycle….In this short post I will walk thru our current test setup with an FPGA, the Spartan 3E, controlling a 18-bit 7″ 800×480 TFT display.”

Posted April 23, 2013 by Chris

“This amazing looking device is a quadcopter that was designed by me and my team at the University of Victoria….The purpose of the project was to create a DIY quadcopter for under $200 and push the limits of what the 3D printer in our laboratory can do.”

Posted April 22, 2013 by Chris

“The first decision you have to make is which Arduino compatible microcontroller you are going to base your circuit around. This will depend on the number of input/output pins you need as well as the size of the compiled sketch you intend to use. Given that I’m prototyping my ideas using an Arduino UNO, I decided to stick with the ATmega328P-PU chip the UNO is based around.”

Posted April 21, 2013 by Chris

“In this post I’m going to first alter a robot arm I had built previously from a beginners kit so that it can be controlled from Arduino. Then I’m going to write a series of posts on different ways to control the robot arm using Processing and other things.”

Posted April 20, 2013 by Chris

“One of the first projects I published online a couple of years ago was about how to put together in a prototype board a simple circuit to interface a 10BaseT ethernet controller with a Microchip PIC18 microcontroller running the TCP/IP stack developed by Microchip. I called this project the PIC10T.”

Posted April 18, 2013 by Chris

This week we’re rolling out a new less for our Introduction To Digital Electronics course and it’s called Design An SR Latch. Here is what this week’s lesson is all about:

The next step into the digital work is to create stable logic elements. The first such element is called a latch and it can be built using simple logic gates. In this lesson we will explore how to build a latch using NOR logic gates and NAND logic gates. In addition, we will take a look at what timing diagrams are and how to use them.