Posted July 12, 2013 by Chris

“OpenSCB is still a project under heavy development. Its goal is to create a fully open source servo controller. That means that we have designed a board with all the hardware to interface with classic RC servos, AX-12/AX-18 servos, openservo and more… It’s using a powerfull 32-bits microcontroller and it has a USB port for programming and control with a PC.”

Posted July 4, 2013 by Chris

“This is a skin-detection based game of pong on a VGA monitor in which two players compete with one another to slip the ball past the other’s paddle towards the boundary. Each paddle follows the motion of a player’s hand in the vertical direction through an HTC 231x CCD camera.”

Posted May 31, 2013 by Chris

“A while ago I got my hands on some old split-flap displays from a train station. Yesterday I finished driver circuits for 8 of the segments. It was only just in time to also quickly implement a clock algorithm for an extraordinary clock to display the turn of the year. Don’t miss the movie at the end of this posting.”

Posted May 14, 2013 by Chris

“Take your MSP430 for a spin with Spoke Ink! Spoke Ink is a booster pack that attaches to the spokes of your bicycle wheel. Using an array of 32 RGB LEDs and a magnetic sensor, this booster pack projects a bright, upright image right from the spokes of your wheel. Using our software, you can create this image from any bitmap.”

Posted May 13, 2013 by Chris

“The cube described on this page uses a 5 x 5 x 5 matrix of single colour LEDs. This is a good size to experiment with as the number of LEDs required at 125 keeps the cost down, doesn’t take too long to assemble and just fits onto a eurocard sized PCB. The power requirement is under 1 amp and the use of just one colour keeps both the hardware construction and control software fairly simple.”

Posted May 3, 2013 by Chris

“The goal of our project is to create a VGA video adapter. This ‘homemade video card’ should be able to connect to any monitor that subscribes to VGA standards with a standard connector and display the desired material reliably. The challenges involved here stem from adapting a general use microprocessor that we are familiar with to a specific task…”

Posted April 30, 2013 by Chris

“I am trying to interface an LCD panel from a vintage 486 Compaq Contura 420cx to the VGA port at 640×480 resolution with 3 bits of color (one bit per color — RGB) for the purpose of displaying data from my upcoming ENSURE-2 near-space project.”

Posted April 29, 2013 by Chris

“Rarely a month goes by without an article in SERVO Magazine describing the communications needed to control an analog R/C servo, so I will keep the review short. There are no official standards on R/C servos, so many aspects of their operation vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, or even for different product lines from the same manufacturer.”

Posted April 28, 2013 by Chris

“I put together this Pong demo as an exercise to help get more familiar with Verilog, and gain some experience working with the Xilinx tools and the Spartan 3A FPGA starter kit. It was very slow going at first, but things are slowly beginning to make sense to me now. And hey, I’ve got Pong!!”

Posted April 27, 2013 by Chris

“Evertool is an AVRISP/STK500-protocol and JTAGICE compatible Programmer/JTAG debugger. It has the following features: ISP Programmer compatible with Atmel AVRISP, directly accessable with AVRStudio and avrdude. JTAG debugger compatible with Atmel JTAGICE, directly accessable with AVRStudio and AVaRice. Simple hardware, standard parts.”