Posted January 3, 2013 by Chris

“In this article, we will go step-by-step through the process of understanding, designing and building a system that uses an infrared proximity sensor for input, correlates that input to how far away an object is from the sensor and then drives a motor and some LEDs at distinct speeds depending upon the proximity of the object.”

Posted January 2, 2013 by Chris

“HiJack is a hardware/software platform for creating cubic-inch sensor peripherals for the mobile phone. HiJack devices harvest power and use bandwidth from the mobile phone’s headset interface. The HiJack platform enables a new class of small and cheap phone-centric sensor peripherals that support plug-and-play operation.”

Posted January 1, 2013 by Chris

“A compass can be a valuable sensor that your robot can use to navigate the world. The Dinsmore 1490 compass is a cheap and durable unit that is relatively easy to interface to. It provides 8 headings (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, and NW). 4 signals, N,S,E,W are read by the Basic Stamp II controller to determine the robot’s heading.”

Posted December 31, 2012 by Chris

Happy New Year 2013!

Posted December 30, 2012 by Chris

“An embroidered fabric speaker made into a pillow. Inside the pillow a amplification module hacked from a commercial device lets you easily connect your mp3 player to play back your favorite music. While the speaker might not be as loud as commercial speakers, you can very comfortably lay your head down on it to rest.”

Posted December 29, 2012 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 December 28, 2012 by Chris

“Last Sunday I gave a workshop in TOG as part of its Engineer’s Week 2011 activities. We spent the day assembling an 8×8 Red/Green LED Matrix Display circuit which I designed in strip board. The circuit forms an interface between a micro controller and an 8 by 8 Dual Color Common Anode LED Module.”

Posted December 27, 2012 by Chris

Last week, we learned more about The 555 Timer, the 9th lesson of the first PyroEDU course: An Introduction To Modern Electronics. This week we’re going back to more basic things, with documentation.

Beyond the electronics and fun experiments that we have performed in the previous lessons, we need to study how electrical schematics are drawn so that we can document our designs. This lesson gives an overview of how to draw schematics and takes a few looks at what datasheets are, how to use them and why we need them.

Posted December 26, 2012 by Chris

“The OU 4-rotor flying robot is based on the Silverlit XUFO. We have added an Atmel Mega8 microcontroller equipped with a Devantech compass. This microcontroller overrides the RF receiver of the XUFO and provides its own pulse-width-modulated control signal. Because we insert this signal immediately after the RF stage, the functionality of the XUFO gyroscope is left intact.”

Posted December 25, 2012 by Chris

“The aim is to build a robot system that uses the newly introduced depth cameras (RGB-D) to perform a variety of tasks. The core tasks are to map and localise in an unknown environment without a prior knowledge and to recognise 3D objects using only curvature information. The robot is also able to take the current map available and use that to calculate a path from point A to B avoiding any obstacles.”