Posted January 24, 2013 by Chris

“In this article we’ll explore how to use a commercial motor controller board to tell a stepper motor what to do. We’ll also explore some additional functionality of the board including how to setup limit switches as interrupts.”

Posted January 23, 2013 by Chris

“A nice thing about the HP laserjets is that they have a little display, and you can use PJL, a sort of controlling language, to change what’s displayed on it, using a bit of code that runs on a PC. Problem was: I didn’t have a PC connected to the laserjet, so I had to divine a standalone solution.”

Posted January 21, 2013 by Chris

“I used the standard version of Eagle to create a four-layer board with internal ground and power planes. The board carries an LPC1343 microprocessor which takes input from an onboard sensor stick containing accelerometer, compass, and gyro chips. After some sensor fusion and optionally in response to joystick input, the board provides PWM signals to four brushless DC motor controllers at a rate of 200Hz.”

Posted January 19, 2013 by Chris

“You may have seen my recent blog post about building a Phone-controlled Robot using Twilio. Since then, I’ve had ideas for new Twilio + Arduino mashups pouring in from the community. Today is the second post in our new series of Twilio Hardware mashups – build your own home automation solution using Twilio SMS, PowerSwitch, Arduino, and PusherApp.”

Posted January 17, 2013 by Chris

“In this article, we will show you how to build a system where the input and output have seperate microcontrollers and are linked together using XBee modules. The input system will use an infrared distance sensor to measure how far away an object is from the sensor and the output will drive a standard DC motor using a power transistor.”

Posted December 28, 2012 by Chris

“Last Sunday I gave a workshop in TOG as part of its Engineer’s Week 2011 activities. We spent the day assembling an 8×8 Red/Green LED Matrix Display circuit which I designed in strip board. The circuit forms an interface between a micro controller and an 8 by 8 Dual Color Common Anode LED Module.”

Posted December 12, 2012 by Chris

“Much has been written about driving stepper motors. Some sites say it’s easy. Some people say it’s hard. Some people say you have to get the timing and the sequence right, some people say it’s more hassle than it’s worth and you should just buy a stepper driver board! We’ve spent just a few hours today playing about with our stepper motor and found it’s quite straight forward – provided you follow each step slowly and carefully.”

Posted December 5, 2012 by Chris

“The following explains the design of a control circuit for the TFT-LCD module LQ043T3DX02 Sharp, best known as the display used in the PlayStation Portable (PSP). It has a 480×272 resolution capable of displaying up to 16 million colors through a data bus 24-bit RGB backlight built.”

Posted November 28, 2012 by Chris

“A major focus of the SoundPuddle project right now is building a new circuit board to run the installation and carry it through the next two years. The installation is controlled by a Papilio FPGA, which connects the other parts of the system – the microphone and audio input hardware, the flash memory, and control hardware for the LED strips. The Zpuino, a softcore running inside the FPGA, handles most of the logic for the system.”

Posted November 9, 2012 by Chris

“This project provides a general purpose library which implements read and write support for MMC, SD and SDHC memory cards. It includes: low-level MMC, SD and SDHC read/write routines, partition table support and a simple FAT16/FAT32 read/write implementation.”