Posted February 13, 2015 by Chris

"Xbees are some of the most powerful wireless modules you can find and they’re also very easy to configure and use…If you’re like me and only bought the modules without the breakout boards or forgot to buy it, then you have to make the modules breadboard friendly to use it. I’ve made a PCB which converts the 2.0mm spacing of the pins of xbee to the normal DIP spacing of 2.54mm."

Posted February 6, 2015 by Chris

"Our vehicle uses optical sensors to follow a line on the floor. Some autonomous vehicles used in manufacturing use a similar concept, following magnetic strips embedded in the factory floor. The versatility of an optical design should be readily apparent, since re-routing the vehicle requires no more than re-painting a line."

Posted February 3, 2015 by Chris

"Here’s an application to control the brightness of an RGB LED strip wirelessly (via Bluetooth) using a smartphone. The whole project is presented in a dedicated Bluetooth shield for Arduino and a RGB shield."

Posted January 16, 2015 by Chris

"The Wireless Power Meter is a simplistic ATmega88p and ZigBee/XBee based true V-I power meter. AC voltage measurement is made from the rectified signal of a step-down transformer, and current measurement is made with the pass-through Allegro ACS712 Hall-Effect sensor."

Posted January 8, 2015 by Chris

"While sitting in my chair today, I got bored with whatever else I was doing, so I stopped and decided to set up a secondary Raspberry Pi to see just how easy it is to get the PiFace Control and Display up and running, and start analyzing infrared remote codes with it."

Posted January 7, 2015 by Chris

"Robots capable of flight in cramped and cluttered environments have many advantages over their ground-based counterparts, but most current systems suffer from the same fundamental problem: any contact with obstacles have catastrophic, mission-ending results. What if instead of avoiding collisions, a flying robot became robust to them, and could even take advantage of contact with its environment?"

Posted December 31, 2014 by Chris

"Fireworks are dangerous so I want to make this all as safe as I can. I think the best way to do this is to devise an SOP that can guide the design of devices and of the code. You could use this approach of using a standard or safe operating procedure to guide the design of many types of devices."

Posted December 30, 2014 by Chris

"The new box has two new distance sensors, with differing ranges. One transmits very fine values between about 2 inches and 10 inches, the other larger values between about 4 and 18 inches. Staggering the ranges like this allows for a whole new world of control for the user, such as tilting the hand from front to back, using two hands with complete independence, etc."

Posted December 22, 2014 by Chris

"I wanted to make use of bluetooth capability somehow, and thought it would be neat to send a text message to the display. In addition, I decided change up a few things: receive bluetooth text message up to 64 chars and scroll it across the panel, set the time via bluetooth, consolidate 2 push buttons into 1 for manual time adjustment and make some noise with the piezo I put in there"

Posted December 18, 2014 by Chris

"Today’s tutorial is a bit different: I’m going to show you how to make your ethernet shield wireless! You can find many Wi-fi shields for Arduino: starting from the official one, up to shields based on Microchip’s ICs. Sometimes however it could be easier to connect an Arduino to the Wi-fi network using your ethernet shield in conjunction with a wireless router."