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Op Amp PID Controller Design

February 2, 2012 by Chris
“We've all heard about the wonders of the PID controller, bringing a system's output - temperature, velocity, light - to its desired set point quickly and accurately. But now, your boss says okay, design one for us. Although there's a number of ways to do it, the circuit above nicely separates the three terms into three individual op amp circuits. We'll build it in SPICE, test each term and finally place it inside a motor speed controller for you to tune.”

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Custom I2C Servo Motor Controller

January 31, 2012 by Chris
“This is the servo controller for my robot. It uses a MC33887 H-Bridge chip to power the motor, an Atmega88 as the contoller, and an I2C interface. It was designed to be the motion drive for a robot, but being a servo drive with position feedback, I will probably use it to rotate and elevate the turret, and possibly use it for the sonar movement.”

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Temperature Data Logger Using PIC

January 29, 2012 by Chris
“This project describes an easy and inexpensive way of adding a digital thermometer and data logging feature to a PC. It involves a PIC microcontroller that gets the surrounding temperature information from the Microchip MCP9701 sensor, and sends it to a PC through an USB-UART interface. The USB port of the PC is also used to power the device.”

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Motorcycle Universal Gear Indicator

January 27, 2012 by Chris
“This is a new design for a universal gear indicator that can be fitted to any motorcycle as an aftermarket accessory. Its main advantage is that its operation depends entirely on the gear shift lever movement, instead of connecting to speedometer and tachometer sensors....It consists of a main circuit including a 7 segment LED indicator, two Hall sensors that are attached to the motorcycle frame, and a small magnet placed on the gear shift lever.”

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Outdoor Motion Sensing Light Controller

January 22, 2012 by Chris
“Those days when I come home at night and straight into the darkness are finally over. This is a very practical device and I built it so that it is a module to my Dual Channel IR Remote Control. Because of that I ended up with a definite overkill of what is supposed to be a simple switch with a timer when I open/close my door. Anyway, it is modular+wireless and that's what I like.”

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Contact-less Infrared Digital Tachometer

January 17, 2012 by Chris
“The contact with the rotating shaft is avoided with an optical sensing mechanism that uses an infrared (IR) light emitting diode and a photo detecting diode. The IR LED transmits an infrared light towards the rotating disc and the photo detecting diode receives the reflected light beam. This special arrangement of sensors is placed at about an inch away and facing towards the rotating disc.”

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PACKit – Serial to Ethernet Development System

January 16, 2012 by Chris
“The idea of building an RS232 to Ethernet bridge seemed like a great way to begin learning about embedded system design. Having created a working sample, though it was left with my teammate after graduation, I decided to recreate the project with more features and higher reliability. The project was later renamed from 'STEDS' to 'NI-1' (Network Interface 1) and finally 'Pack-it'. Pack-it is based on a Motorola MC9S12 MCU and a CS8900A Cirrus Ethernet controller.”

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PIC18F Based Line-Follower

January 10, 2012 by Chris
“This was a second-year Embedded Systems Application Project at university. We were given the hardware and after assembling the robot, had to write firmware for it. The PIC MCU programming was done in C. As it was the first time this course was run, objectives were not concrete and were updated as students progressed. Some of the objectives were: follow a line, go over a ramp and memorize a track.”

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HCS12 VGA generator

December 23, 2011 by Chris
“My implementation produces 640x480 signals, but the display is limited to 80x60 blocks...the HCS12 bus can run at 25MHz max, and it takes at least 5 bus cycles to write a byte to an I/O port. For normal VGA, pixels must be written out at a rate of 25MHz.”

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Xbee Wireless Servo Control

December 22, 2011 by Chris
Today's article shows you how to build a basic wireless input and output system in the form of a single transmitter and single receiver. Communication is one way to keep things simple with two xbee modules being used for the wireless link. In the end, a small trimpot will control the movement of a servo motor.

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