Posted October 12, 2011 by Chris

“The basic system uses a special FIFO chip (7204) which is dual-ported to store logic-state samples which are transferred into a PC and displayed using a Win-32 front-end.” If you’ve ever been curious about building your own logic analyzer, here’s a well documented open-source analyzer that will help get you started.

Posted September 19, 2011 by Chris

A DC servo motor is a powerful tool if you know how to design it properly. They offer high torque and high precision, something that steppers can’t always offer. This article dis-assembles a standard inkjet printer to show you how to experiment with building a low cost DIY servo system. They even recommend using my 10-A H-Bridge! The article is a two parter, so don’t miss both pages.

Posted September 12, 2011 by Chris

Fans of the ATTiny now have another tool to add to their bag of tricks: an Arduino programmer! This article explains how to use an Arduino to program the ATTiny using the SPI communication protocol. The method is straight forward with no surprises so it could theoretically work with any microcontroller that has an SPI module built in.

Posted September 9, 2011 by Chris

This Week’s PyroElectro tutorial takes a look at PIC interrupts vs. polling techniques for fast input/output systems. Polling for input usually means a lot more overhead and redundant code, so we turn to interrupts for event driven systems to minimize overhead. This tutorial uses a learn-by-example approach to show how interrupts work and how we use them.

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.