Posted August 25, 2014 by Chris

"An IR sensor is a device which detects IR radiation falling on it. There are numerous types of IR sensors that are built and can be built depending on the application."

Posted August 23, 2014 by Chris

"Traditionally, radio receivers were built using analog hardware, like capacitors, coils and quartz crystals for filtering, and a diode as a detector. However, by converting analog signals to digital ones, one can replace part of this signal processing by a computer program operating (i.e., doing calculations) on the digital signals."

Posted August 6, 2014 by Chris

"Essentially, I wanted to be able to control a little robotic arm / turret using a PC with a serial port. I thought this was a worthwhile project because I could later adapt it to aim a webcam, Nerf toy gun, or maybe even a felt pen so it could draw pictures."

Posted August 4, 2014 by Chris

"Here’s a cheap way to build your own fully customisable infrared PC remote control. If you already have a suitable infrared remote control going spare you can build one of these for under £4, it will allow you to use most infrared remote controls to issue keyboard commands on your PC."

Posted July 28, 2014 by Chris

"Last week my little friend (7 years old) bought a new RC car and challenged me for a race. So I bought new sets of batteries and cleaned my dusty RC car. Only to find out that it doesn’t work anymore. The forward and reverse movement are still good but the steering part was the problem. What a shame – I lost by default :). So I decided to hacked it and make it Arduino controlled."

Posted July 27, 2014 by Chris

"…The car in front of me drove with his emergency flashers on, and at times all I could see were his lights. At that moment the crazy idea popped in my head – I wonder if I could use a PC monitor and phototransistors to send data to a microchip? I can’t think of any immediate uses for this capability, but perhaps if I make a working prototype I’ll stumble upon some."

Posted July 18, 2014 by Chris

"RFID is known as Radio Frequency IDentification. The technology is able to wireless-ly picking up information from a RFID tag which can be embedded onto most object. Fast and reliable. RFID has helped to rise up our productivity."

Posted June 30, 2014 by Chris

"Contact-less measurement of RPM will be achieved through an IR sensor. An IR diode will send a beam of infrared towards the rotating disc, and any reflected pulse will be received by a photo diode. The resistance of a photo diode drops drastically when exposed to infrared. An infrared is reflected by a white surface and absorbed by the dark ones."

Posted June 19, 2014 by Chris

"…Shortly after the handheld Open SciCal got picked up, I got an order for a few Open SciCal’s, hand-made, with the wi-fi attachment, and to be delivered to an address in downtown Manhattan. I did a little more research, and it turns out that they’re going to be used by an actual trading firm on Wallstreet…..I asked for an example in source code, and here it is – very simplified, and coded up for Yahoo finance…"

Posted June 18, 2014 by Chris

"This project aims to create an open source wildlife tracking collar system to help conservationists protect the last 2000 lions living in the wild in Southern Kenya, and safeguard the Maasai herders cattle, restoring Maasai-land to a working ecosystem."