Posted February 1, 2012 by Chris

“The SudoGlove is a gesture controller that can be easily interfaced with hardware or software via a wireless connection. The glove implements an array of sensors plus filtering circuitry and mathematical analysis firmware to derive state values for each sensor and transmits them to an authorized receiver. I have used the glove to drive an RC car, to synthesize music, to manipulate openGL video, to control arbitrary processing software, and to control performance lighting effects.”

Posted January 16, 2012 by Chris

“The idea of building an RS232 to Ethernet bridge seemed like a great way to begin learning about embedded system design. Having created a working sample, though it was left with my teammate after graduation, I decided to recreate the project with more features and higher reliability. The project was later renamed from ‘STEDS’ to ‘NI-1′ (Network Interface 1) and finally ‘Pack-it’. Pack-it is based on a Motorola MC9S12 MCU and a CS8900A Cirrus Ethernet controller.”

Posted January 6, 2012 by Chris

“The main goals of this project was to learn Verilog, to learn about buses and to create a platform for future projects which require the parallelism and/or exact timing of an FPGA combined with the ease of programming of a general purpose PC. An example of a future project is a programmable function generator. At the command of an application running on the PC, the FPGA can generate square waves or PWM signals to feed into a device under test.”

Posted November 15, 2011 by Chris

“Raster-scan displays, like a TV, require a number of synchronization signals to operate. The display is addressed as multiple, consecutive, horizontal lines, which scan from left to right, displaying a large number of pixels on the line as it advances. At the end of a line, the display begins to scan the next line from left to right until the entire frame (consisting of many lines) is displayed.”

Posted November 5, 2011 by Chris

“On this page I will describe how to communicate with HD44780-based LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays) using an Atmel AVR microcontroller. The page is mainly meant as a place for me to keep information on the pinouts of the display modules I have used, and to gather info about these displays, for me and others to use.”

Posted October 27, 2011 by Chris

Touch screens seem to be the must-have innovation of the decade as they’re seen in almost every new gadget and gizmo that comes out. But how exactly do they work and how can we use them? This PyroElectro article explains how a standard 4-wire resistive touch screen works and how to get the X/Y coordinates of a touched point using a PIC 18F452 microcontroller.

Posted October 21, 2011 by Chris

“Our purpose here is to explore the potential of PIC12F683 micro for which we need a development board. The good thing is we are going to make our own board. The schematic and the actual board that I have built are shown below. I soldered all the components on a 12 x 8 cm general purpose prototyping board. ”

Posted October 17, 2011 by Chris

This 8-bit graphics card uses a resistor DAC, CPLD and some SRAM for a frame buffer. The article gives a brief overview (in german) of what the system uses, but the devil is in the details: the source code and hardware schematic/board layout are available for download. If you’ve ever wanted to make your own low-profile video card, this design will get you started.

Posted October 6, 2011 by Chris

To go with my other vga oriented projects here’s a VGA interface that is built entirely with TTL discrete logic chips. I built it primarily for the 7400 contest over at dangerous prototypes, so give a comment over there if you like the design. This interface outputs the proper Hsync and Vsync signals using some 74193 counters and uses an 8-state machine to output different color signals to an LCD.

Posted September 29, 2011 by Chris

If you want to make a super simple I/O system that anyone can use, the ps/2 keyboard and a standard 16×2 LCD is all you need. This article explains how to display input from a PS/2 keyboard on a 16×2 lcd with a few example ‘commands’ like backspace and delete. PS/2 and 16×2 LCD theory is explained, the hardware schematic is included and the software available in the article.