Posted April 23, 2013 by Chris

“This amazing looking device is a quadcopter that was designed by me and my team at the University of Victoria….The purpose of the project was to create a DIY quadcopter for under $200 and push the limits of what the 3D printer in our laboratory can do.”

Posted April 17, 2013 by Chris

“Finally I have found some time over the past week-end to enhance my Zumo robot. After I had my line following robot based on the Pololu Zumo chassis and the FRDM-KL25Z, I thought it should be easy and logical to solve a maze. Logical: yes. Easy: not that much. In fact it took me longer than expected. As always, there are a lot of tiny and important problems to solve.”

Posted April 13, 2013 by Chris

“The PICkit™ 2 Programmer/Debugger is a low-cost development tool with an easy to use interface for programming and debugging Microchip’s Flash families of microcontrollers. The full featured Windows programming interface supports baseline, mid-range, PIC18,8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit microcontrollers, and many Microchip Serial EEPROM products.”

Posted April 12, 2013 by Chris

“RC model helicopter prices have reached a point where all sorts of challenging (i.e. crash-prone) robotics projects become affordable. This document explains how to build a 300 g helicopter with embedded Linux and Bluetooth datalink from off-the shelf components for less than 500 EUR.”

Posted April 1, 2013 by Chris

“The robot starts moving automatically each time when the reset switch is pressed, the robot itsself finds an obstacle free path using the IR SENSORS. Whenever an obstacle appears, the robot changes its direction to avoid the obstacle and continue on its path.”

Posted March 13, 2013 by Chris

“I needed some ultrasonic range finders for my project. But most of the commercial sensors like Parallax’s PING sensor and other similar products are quite expensive, especially if multiple units are needed. So I thought why not building it myself?”

Posted March 3, 2013 by Chris

“The goal of our project was to create both the hardware and software platform that can be used as a adaptable haptic data visualization device. Imagine you have a complex data set from which you create a surface plot in MATLAB….what if you could feel it? Bring it to life? With our current haptic visualizer, users can feel any arbitrary surface plot generated in MATLAB…”

Posted February 22, 2013 by Chris

“I spent part of an afternoon developing a hardware RSS reader (most of my time was spent on the python side of things). It’s pretty simple and uses an AVR microcontroller connected to a computer via a serial cable.”

Posted February 21, 2013 by Syd

“In this article, we will be looking once again to lessen the burdens of every day life by automating some of the tasks which take up our precious time. We will be using Cron, a time-based job scheduler in Linux to periodically run scripts to do things we would normally have to do manually.”

Posted February 20, 2013 by Chris

“Now the real fun begins. Even though the Hexbug’s motion is limited, with the addition of a few simple sensors and some clever programming, it can do remarkable things. For example, a right turn is accomplished by doing a reverse turn for about 2 seconds. How can it make a left turn? Simply do a right turn for 6 seconds – 3 right turns equal one left turn.”