Posted February 5, 2012 by Chris

“In this project we turned an Altera Cyclone II FGPA into a simple video production unit with the help of a Sony Handycam and a PC for serial communication. The main focus of the project is the ability to provide a green screen effect, most commonly seen with weather news. We would extract the green regions of the video based on a threshold and display a background image, such as a weather map.”

Posted January 23, 2012 by Chris

“Our project is a twenty four and half inch aluminum frame robotic arm with four degrees of freedom. In our project we made the arm the second player in the classic game of Tic-Tac-Toe to demonstrate its repeatable motion. The arm consists of five servo motors, four to control the motion and one to control the end effecter (gripper). The arm moves tic-tac-toe pieces onto a board for its opponent and itself to give the user interactive control over the arm.”

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 15, 2012 by Chris

“This project enables your MCU to communicate in real time to a web browser. I started this project after seeing a similar implementation on hackaday from mbed.org. Their implementation uses their own device, the mbed Cortex-M0 beta. I’ve been a hobbyist microchip PIC developer for a few years, so I set out to write my own version for microchip’s 8bit pic devices in C. The microcontroller used is a microchip PIC18F4620.”

Posted December 24, 2011 by Chris

“This article introduces an implementation of a simplified filtering algorithm that was inspired by Kalman filter. The Arduino code is tested using a 5DOF IMU unit from GadgetGangster – Acc_Gyro . The theory behind this algorithm was first introduced in my Imu Guide article.”

Posted December 18, 2011 by Chris

“The robot design allows a single user to easily oversee the operation of a large Kilobot collective, such as programming, powering on, and charging all robots, which would be difficult or impossible to do with many existing robotic systems. The researchers demonstrate the capabilities of the Kilobot as a collective robot, using a 29 robot test collective to implement some popular swarm behaviors.”

Posted December 15, 2011 by Chris

This article gives a quick intro to how you get started using the DE0 Nano development board with a simple example program. All you need is a DE0 Nano and a laptop, and you can get started building and programming your own FPGA logic.

Posted December 5, 2011 by Chris

“The goal of this project is to construct a digital controller for a w all climbing micro-robot. There are two kind of wall-climbing micro-robots in the lab. One is called ‘Flipper’, the other is called ‘Crawler’. The restrictions such as small size, light weight and low power consumption must be complied when designing the miniature robot.”

Posted December 1, 2011 by Syd

“In this article we are going to use the Last.fm web service to grab the last piece of data we need to make our music collection perfect: the album artwork. We’re going to use the same techniques we’ve used in the past articles to expand the functionality of our application to do something new. With the concepts we employed in the previous articles, the possibilities are nearly limitless.”

Posted November 22, 2011 by Chris

“The project intends to accomplish all computational tasks for the fractal sets using the embedded PowerPC 440 RISC CPU, ultimately for characterization of the CPU-based processing performance. If, in the end, the computational performance lacks significantly for the intended application, selected computational tasks might still be offloaded from the CPU to hardware-based processing.”