Posted 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.”

Posted 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!

Posted 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:”

Posted 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.

Posted 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.”

Posted October 22, 2011 by Chris

This article offers a very detailed write-up of how the author built an ambient lamp with network control capability. Software and hardware theory and design are explained thoroughly and available in the article, good for some light saturday-sunday reading.

Posted October 20, 2011 by Chris

My crazy 7400 logic circuits continue with this week’s parody of a movie prop from Iron Man 2. The circuit built in this project is a beeping down counter and since I didn’t see this classic circuit entered into the 7400contest, I figured there’s time left for one last entry. Just like in Iron Man 2 there’s a little red button to start the countdown, a dual 7 segment led display and a nice ‘beep’ for each count.

Posted October 14, 2011 by Chris

Time for more accelerometer stuff! Since the 7400 logic competition is allowing more than one entry, I figured why not build something else? This tilt sensor was designed using only 7400 TTL discrete logic parts, so there is no software involved. It uses an accelerometer sensor’s output for X and Y axis to show you how much the board is tilted on an 8×8 LED matrix display.

Posted October 10, 2011 by Chris

“The unit is designed to function (user configurable) either as a temperature alarm or a thermostat – the only difference being that with an alarm an intermittent beep is produced when a limit is exceeded.” The open source hardware schematic and PIC software are provided in the article, along with an in depth explanation of how the system works.

Posted October 4, 2011 by Chris

“This cheap and easy to build NiCd/NiMH Battery Charger is suitable for automatically charging a wide range of batteries for many applications. Proper chargers are usually expensive and cheap chargers supplied with the original equipment often incorrectly charge the cells and dramatically shorten their life.”