Posted October 1, 2013 by Chris

"This article shows how to do a simple communication via a RS232 interface with a PIC microcontroller. RS232 is a standard for a serial communication interface which allows to send and receive data via at least three wires. With the RS232 interface it is possible to setup a connection between a microcontroller and a PC or between two microcontrollers."

Posted September 29, 2013 by Chris

"A few weeks ago I needed an Arduino compatible Micro SD adapter but didn’t want to wait for one to arrive in the post so inspired by the breadboard ghetto Micro SD socket I knocked up a mini shield using a bit of left over stripboard and a SD to Micro SD adapter."

Posted September 28, 2013 by Chris

"I have a few old N64 controllers lying around and figured that it would be pretty cool to use them to control other things. In this article I will describe in detail every step I took to achieve this. I’ve used a PIC microcontroller, but it should not be too hard to port the code to any other architecture."

Posted September 20, 2013 by Chris

“I have always wanted to create a VGA generator. It has been a personal goal of mine for some time. Over the past couple of weeks I toyed with the idea and finally decided to implement one. I decided to implement it as a framebuffer to allow for general purpose display rather than application specific display. I implemented my own small colour gamut to be memory and CPU efficient.”

Posted September 11, 2013 by Chris

“Goals: [1] Create a wireless device that sends data from a simple tilt switch. [2] Use a PC to capture, analyze, and detect shaking mosion…..Method: Place a simple tilt switch on a wireless RF board (PIC12F675). Receive the RF data onto a USB PIC (PIC18F2550). Transmit the data to a laptop using USB serial port emulation (PBP code). Analyze the data using Processing, identify and visualize shake-motion.”

Posted September 2, 2013 by Chris

“Arturo Vidich, Sofy Yuditskaya and I needed a way to read brains for our Mental Block project last fall. After looking at the options, we decided that hacking a toy EEG would be the cheapest / fastest way to get the data we wanted. Here’s how we did it.”

Posted August 31, 2013 by Chris

“By using light sensor with transistor switch, you can make a ‘LED that turns on when dark’ circuit without bothering with microcontrollers.”

Posted August 26, 2013 by Chris

“This Arduino based circuit is used for setting the RGB-channels of the IKEA Dioder LED list based on serial input. The serial input is provided by a Python script that converts HSV colors to RGB to provide a nice loop-around-effect. This is a replacement controller for the original IKEA Dioder RGB LEDs, and does not need modifications to the original PCB.”

Posted July 23, 2013 by Chris

“…In this project, we use MOSFETs because of their high switching speed and low RDS resistance for low heat dissipation. H-Bridge configuration requires both P and N type MOSFETs but since N-type MOSFETs have improved electrical characteristics, using only N-type for four of the transistors will be ideal…”

Posted July 17, 2013 by Chris

“This is an article from an electronics amateur, experienced in embedded design and programming. He has utilized the BPS-5-3 breadboard power stick, LC04A Logic Level Shifter and WIZnet Serial to Ethernet Gateway, to show a basic interface between WIZnet gateway, Graphic LCD, PIC microcontroller and the setup.”