Posted July 21, 2012 by Chris

“The idea came to me after seeing Sprite’s minimalistic version of the Hackaday’s Flickering LED circuit. It’s a simple circuit that flickers LEDs and detects darkness. I thought that this could make a great little Advent wreath. My version should have 4 LEDs and should be support first, second, third and fourth Advent.”

Posted July 17, 2012 by Chris

“The Spatialized Umbrella project offers an entirely new dimension to walking in the rain. Using light and sound spatialization this umbrella creates an immersive, mobile, and highly personal multi-sensory environment. Range sensing technology helps the Spatialized Umbrella react to your movement through a space.”

Posted July 16, 2012 by Chris

“Most of the time Kelso is a great cat….However, he still seems to squeeze in some mischief despite a rigorous schedule that includes sleeping 18 hours a day. We need a solution and it needs to be high tech. A quick search of the spare parts bin in ‘the lab’ yields a PICAXE 28X1 custom programable microcontroller, a piezo speaker, a Sharp InfraRed Rangefinder and a AA battery holder.”

Posted June 10, 2012 by Chris

“D-pad is short form for directional pad which is usually a thumb-operated directional control with one button on each direction. For me, it is a very good input for a microcontroller system that allows the user to navigate through various menu and setting for a microcontroller system. ”

Posted June 6, 2012 by Chris

“In the fall of 2007, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) became the first university in the nation to offer a bachelor’s degree program in the emerging field of robotics engineering (RBE). The university’s groundbreaking program is now also the first in the nation to receive accreditation from ABET, the organization that accredits engineering programs nationwide.”

Posted April 1, 2012 by Chris

“Normally, Papydoo is asleep. The enclosure sits on top of a vibration sensor. Papydoo is waken up by a sufficiently strong vibration. Two eyes are then displayed on the LED matrix, wandering randomly around. After a few seconds with no vibration detected, the eyes close and Papydoo goes back to sleep.”

Posted March 8, 2012 by Chris

“In this article we will build an example system and use the basic tilt sensor as an input into a microcontroller. The microcontroller will read the data input from the tilt sensor and act accordingly to output the current state of the tilt sensor. Everything will be done on a breadboard to show how easy it is to assemble and use the system.”

Posted February 22, 2012 by Chris

“Description: This spectaculously amazorbing ball that will mesmerise all who look at it, caturday will no longer be the same ! The Specs: There are 384 LEDs all individually controllable and programmable, it is compatible with the freely available Arduino IDE and AVR Studio, comes with sample source code and patterns to get you started, as well as being preprogrammed for instant blinky fun.”

Posted February 6, 2012 by Chris

“Along the lines of ‘high-performance’ computation, I have collaborated with Joshua Wise to write (in Verilog) logic to draw a Mandelbrot set in real-time on a VGA monitor. The Mandelbrot set is a connected set of points in the complex plane that depends on an infinite iterative process to determine whether each point is in the set. At each iteration, the original starting point is added to the (complex) square of the previous point.”

Posted January 19, 2012 by Chris

A very neat feature that PWM (pulse with modulation) offers is being able to control the brightness level of LEDs. By varying the duty cycle percentage, we can control the exact brightness of any LED. This article takes you through a simple example design step-by-step using a PIC microcontroller. The end result is an LED controller that can set an LED to 100 unique brightness levels.