Posted January 15, 2014 by Chris

"For the past few weeks I’ve been working on the first stage of a project that involves hacking Eric Boyd’s excellent Heart Spark PCB pendant and combining it with a sensor module I’ve made from scratch."

Posted January 6, 2014 by Chris

"My last project is an audio spectrum analyzer. The work has been done using a MSGEQ7 integrated. The result is shown using an 2X16 LCD display. The bars are built using defined characters.
The chip only gives 7 info of frequency. I’ve arrived until the 16 bar interpolating values based in the 7 given."

Posted January 3, 2014 by Chris

"My first Physical Computing class assignment for this summer was to create a bicycle computer. This is a device that you stick on your bike and it tells you how fast you are going, what your speed is, etc. Following is how I made my own bicycle computer. I used an Arduino to power several features. Data from these features were then displayed on an LCD screen."

Posted December 22, 2013 by Chris

"I have the Arduino Motor Shield working, the Ultrasonic module is pinging around, Christmas brought some small DC toy motors, and a bag of plastic gears is on my desk. All the good ingredients for a small robot: the Freedom Robot!"

Posted December 21, 2013 by Chris

"We have been working on a system to count the number of cups of tea and coffee made on each floor of Imagination’s offices. The #activitea project was started to better understand and illustrate hot beverage consumption at Imagination’s London offices; and to test a process that could serve many other data capture uses."

Posted December 20, 2013 by Chris

"A stepper motor turns the ultrasonic range finder 360 degrees and back. After each step the range finder is activated and the distance is measured. When two measurements have been made the PIC sends the data to the PC using an asynchronous interrupt transfer"

Posted December 17, 2013 by Chris

"I was poking around in the JeeLabs RF12 library recently and noticed that it now supports the ATtiny microcontrollers – it’s what the new JeeNode Micro uses, which got me thinking about even smaller, simpler wireless temperature sensor modules again."

Posted November 24, 2013 by Chris

"All of the hardware and software is open (in the GPL sense), including parts lists, circuit board and chassis designs, and software. With a stated goal to produce sub-€100 robots, I’d really like to see this take off. Combined with a wireless power surface, a micro-robot in perpetual motion would make a great desk ornament!"

Posted November 23, 2013 by Chris

"The various hardware modules are all open source designs – and I chose to use a mix and match approach to the system which was put together using hardware from a variety of vendors. Compatible devices were used from JeeLabs, Openenergymonitor and Nanode Ltd."

Posted November 21, 2013 by Chris

"For our final project, we re-engineered a remote control car to autonomously navigate through a track by detecting lanes and centering itself between them as well as detect objects in front of it and avoid collision. The RC car detects lanes through image input from a low-resolution camera mounted at its front. Using an IR distance sensor, the car determines when to stop accelerating once a certain distance between a forward object has been breached."