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Light Reading: Build A Kilobot Swarm

December 18, 2011 by Chris

“The robot design allows a single user to easily oversee the operation of a large Kilobot collective, such as programming, powering on, and charging all robots, which would be difficult or impossible to do with many existing robotic systems. The researchers demonstrate the capabilities of the Kilobot as a collective robot, using a 29 robot test collective to implement some popular swarm behaviors.”

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AVR Based Digital Thermometer with Nokia 3310 LCD and Thermistor

December 16, 2011 by Chris

“This project shows how to use a simple thermistor to measure temperature and display the temperature graphically on a Nokia 3310 LCD. Thermistors are incredibly cheap (about 50 cents), and provide fractions of a degree accuracy.”

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Fake Car Alarm Circuit – 555 tutorial

December 14, 2011 by Chris

“This page outlines how to make a simple theft detterant which may be just as effective. The idea is to have a flashing red led indicate that your car is protected. This device can protect your vehicle from potential thieves – it makes it look like your car has an armed alarm system installed, which causes thieves to pass by your car in search of an easier target.”

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Open Automation Project

December 13, 2011 by Chris

“The purpose of this project is to engineer modular software and electronic components, from which it is possible to assemble an intelligent mobile robot suitable for home/office environments. This project aims to fill the gap between the powerful mobile robot platforms typically used by researchers, and the small rug-roving robots with limited processing power that are popular with hobbyists.”

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3D Scanner Prototyping

December 10, 2011 by Chris

“How does it work? A digital camera is placed in phonographic rotational axes and records laser light reflections from object's surfaces (it works better in the dark). Distortion of laser line corresponding to object's deformations derive the location from the laser source. Constant rotational speed and precise measurment are very important.”

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Arduino + Python 4-Axis Servo Control

November 29, 2011 by Chris

“This tutorial will describe how to use Arduino to control a bank of four independent RC servos with your PC (or Mac, or *nix Box), using a USB cable and a modular Arduino-Python software stack.”

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Ball Balance Machine II

November 28, 2011 by Chris

If you've ever wanted to build the famous ball and plate balancing project, here's the project with some great documentation. A PC tells an Arduino how to move two servos which move the marble across the board where you want it to go. A webcam tells the PC where the ball is on the board. Take a look!

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Thanksgiving Turkey Shield

November 24, 2011 by Chris

We'll post-pone the final Taming Your Music Collection tutorial until next week in order to take some time and celebrate Thanksgiving. Happy Holidays and here's a TurkeyShield to celebrate:

“In the DIY spirit, of course, here's a 5-step guide to making your own 8-bit embedded turkey:”

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A Morse Code Keyer In VHDL

November 11, 2011 by Chris

This VHDL morse code keyer is written in VHDL by Jim Brady. He has posted the source (for a Xilinx Spartan 3A). He also posted his vintage keyer designs from the 1960's and 1970's. A nice throw back using some modern tech.

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FPGA MD5 Cracker

November 9, 2011 by Chris

“For my Digital Systems Laboratory (ECE 385) at the University of Illinois I had to do a final project using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). My partner and I designed a hardware implementation of the MD5 algorithm and used it to crack MD5 password hashes. A FPGA allows you to prototype digital circuits by utilizing a hardware description language such as VHDL.”

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