Posted September 3, 2011 by Chris

The Enigma machine was a device that Germany used to encrypt their messages during World War 2. This article takes a closer look at the encryption method and duplicates it on a modern PIC microcontroller. A great project for you electronic history buffs out there.

Posted August 31, 2011 by Chris

Have you ever wanted to combine both the powers of FPGA and microcontrollers? This article shows you how one man got a PIC FPGA core working on a Xilinx FPGA and had some fun testing things out. The final design used only 3/4 the logic cells of the FPGA leaving room for some more of your own custom hardware.

Posted August 24, 2011 by Chris

Want to add some sonar to your senses? Look no further, the HALO does what you want in true DIY fashion. Using an Arduino as its brain, the HALO connects together a number of ultrasonic sonar sensors to give you feedback about where obstacles are helping you navigate.

Posted August 19, 2011 by Chris

Continuing with the Animatronics Tutorials for August, this week brings us to Animatronic Mouths. The tutorial shows you two unique methods for building mouths. One mouth is articulated with a hobby servo and the other mouth uses a 16×2 LCD display. The process for building each type of mouth is detailed out with many pictures, descriptions and demonstrations.

Posted August 17, 2011 by Chris

For those of you who love to mod your car, check this one out. This guy (through a long forum post) shows his step-by-step construction of an interface to his car with a PIC microcontroller. In addition, there’s a lot of good information in between the forum pages on the honda civic’s inner electronics.

Posted August 8, 2011 by Chris

Another quad-copter article with a twist: this one is purely open source with extraordinary documentation, both hardware and software. The next gen multicopter is a remote control quad copter designed for the DIY crowd to duplicate on their own. Hardware and software are documented for you to modify, recreate or learn from.

Posted August 3, 2011 by Chris

In a creepy looking monster twist here is a parallax powered animatron that actually has a brain. Aside from being able to move, blink and talk, this animatron has built in speech recognition. Check out the demo video and full article in the pdf.

Posted July 31, 2011 by Chris

Here’s an article describing a conservatively but well designed digital oscilloscope. The Digital part here means the main input is into a DAC instead of op-amps. Atmel microcontrollers are used for processing and video display. The article describes all the details of design and theory of operation, so go build your own!

Posted July 25, 2011 by Chris

This project puts any conventional POV to shame by using a different method for tricking our eyes. This 3D display uses an anisotropic spinning mirror to project images from a separate camera that is outputting video at 5000 FPS. An FPGA is used to conquer the raw speed used by this display system.

Posted July 22, 2011 by Chris

Getting streaming video or even a single snap shot picture out of a camera module is a challenging feat because so much happens so quickly. This article shows you one method for transferring JPEG snap shots from a camera module to your PC using a .NET interface. Things for this project are software heavy and light on the hardware.