Posted February 2, 2012 by Chris

“We’ve all heard about the wonders of the PID controller, bringing a system’s output – temperature, velocity, light – to its desired set point quickly and accurately. But now, your boss says okay, design one for us. Although there’s a number of ways to do it, the circuit above nicely separates the three terms into three individual op amp circuits. We’ll build it in SPICE, test each term and finally place it inside a motor speed controller for you to tune.”

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 29, 2012 by Chris

“This project describes an easy and inexpensive way of adding a digital thermometer and data logging feature to a PC. It involves a PIC microcontroller that gets the surrounding temperature information from the Microchip MCP9701 sensor, and sends it to a PC through an USB-UART interface. The USB port of the PC is also used to power the device.”

Posted January 28, 2012 by Chris

“The Stelladaptor seems to be a solid product but I think that the price per unit, at $29.95, is a bit too high for a single-joystick adapter. That’s why I started thinking about building an adapter myself so I would be able to play emulated games (and others too) with these sticks.”

Posted January 27, 2012 by Chris

“This is a new design for a universal gear indicator that can be fitted to any motorcycle as an aftermarket accessory. Its main advantage is that its operation depends entirely on the gear shift lever movement, instead of connecting to speedometer and tachometer sensors….It consists of a main circuit including a 7 segment LED indicator, two Hall sensors that are attached to the motorcycle frame, and a small magnet placed on the gear shift lever.”

Posted January 26, 2012 by Chris

“In this project we have used two types of different R.F Module like 433Mhz and 315Mhz Interface into Pic16f877a,HT640 for R.F Encoder,HT648 for R.F Decoder Ic’s.Hence in this we have to use two sensors one is for temperature sensor LM35, another one is potentiometer, the two sensors have an output of analog signal so that analog signal is fed into to two adc channel of pic16f877a and the corresponding digital output is get from the serial port, continuously watching the real time parameter monitoring purposes.”

Posted January 22, 2012 by Chris

“Those days when I come home at night and straight into the darkness are finally over. This is a very practical device and I built it so that it is a module to my Dual Channel IR Remote Control. Because of that I ended up with a definite overkill of what is supposed to be a simple switch with a timer when I open/close my door. Anyway, it is modular+wireless and that’s what I like.”

Posted January 18, 2012 by Chris

“The Unibot is a self balancing unicycle robot. This robot combines the principles of the famous wheeled inverted pendulum and inertia wheel pendulum. A well known application of the wheeled inverted pendulum is the Segway. The wheel on the ground is used to establish the stabilization in the y-z-plane. The wheel in the air is used to balance the robot in the x-z-plane.”

Posted January 17, 2012 by Chris

“The contact with the rotating shaft is avoided with an optical sensing mechanism that uses an infrared (IR) light emitting diode and a photo detecting diode. The IR LED transmits an infrared light towards the rotating disc and the photo detecting diode receives the reflected light beam. This special arrangement of sensors is placed at about an inch away and facing towards the rotating disc.”

Posted January 14, 2012 by Chris

“The dsPIC runs on the internal oscillator of 7.37MHz, which is then raised close to 30MHz using the PLL. This enables the board to run without external oscillators and associated loading capacitors. The signal to be analyzed is passed through a high impedance resistor (1Mohms) and then amplified by opamp (TL084). This is done to avoid any high voltage damaging the dsPIC or associated circuit. DC offset is added to the signal to enable it to be measured by ADC (0V to 5V).”