Posted March 28, 2013 by Chris

Following last week’s release of the first lesson of PyroEDU’s new course, An Introduction To Digital Electronics, we are now ready to release Lesson 2: Number Systems. Again, this course is here thanks in large to our Kickstarter Backers, thanks to everyone who helped!

Posted March 27, 2013 by Chris

“How many times have you bought a Nixie tube at a garage sale or swap meet, only to discover once you got home that the tube was outgassed?…With a very high voltage, low current supply, one can build a portable ion source that can ionize the gas inside a tube, without even touching the tube. In effect the user ends up with a magic wand that will cause any cold cathode tube in its presence to light up.”

Posted March 26, 2013 by Chris

“We were inspired to build an ultrasonic security system for our final project by our housing situation this summer. Security is an important part of home, especially if we are going to share a house with prior strangers without a lock on our room door…..In case of intruders, it sends off a sound alarm and alerts the owner via email..”

Posted March 25, 2013 by Chris

“This years theme in "Sketching with Hardware" was Bionics. Consequently, the task was to rebuild or reuse a natural and biological method. Our team decided to imitate the behavior of Tetraodontidae – that’s the family of fish with the ability to inflate their body to a ball-like shape in order to defend itself. In an outburst of pure creativity, we named our prototype Blowfish!”

This might remind you of our Simple Motor Optical Encoder.

Posted March 24, 2013 by Chris

“I wanted a playable game to show the possibilities of the Arduino plattform in workshops. Since I already have a S65-Shield built in a box with two joysticks, I wanted to use that MirrorBot hardware for presentation.”

Posted March 23, 2013 by Chris

“The Parallax Color Sorter uses the BASIC Stamp 2 microcontroller to locate, retrieve, and sort colored balls. This color sorter has the ability to identify five different colored ping-pong balls using the Parallax’s color sensor, the ColorPAL. Using a prototype robotic arm, the machine sorts the balls by color and also sorts according to the scenario set by the programmer.”

Posted March 22, 2013 by Chris

“After the untimely death of my Mac Mini (the last thing that I’ll ever buy from Apple), I recycled it into a clock display using LEDs. Technically, there’s no rocket science involved: an Arduino uses an external clock and displays a matrix of 8×6 colored LEDs for hours, minutes and seconds. A last line of LEDs acts like a pendulum.”
[Link Translated To English]

Posted March 21, 2013 by Chris

We are happy to announce: the first lesson of PyroEDU’s next course, An Introduction To Digital Electronics, has just gone live! The first lesson gives you an overview of what the complete course is about, what you should expect to learn and what exact parts are used throughout the course, so you can follow along building the experiments. Again, this course is here thanks in large to our Kickstarter Backers, thanks to everyone who helped!

Posted March 19, 2013 by Chris

“I will show you how I made the cube on the Flower protoboard, and finally the code to make it shine. You will see the point-to-point wiring is very clear.”

Very similar to our own "Building An 8x8x8 LED Cube" project.

Posted March 18, 2013 by Chris

“For the MIDI lab, I decided to try out a beam-break detection system I had been wondering about for awhile. Creating an invisible string that could be plucked seemed to be a perfect applicaiton for MIDI.”