Posted September 14, 2012 by Chris

“This mini Logic analyzer is a tool for you to watch on LCD the logic transitions 0 or 1 of a digital data signal. A digital data signal can be found on the output pin of TSOP-1730 Infrared Receiver, on the Transmit and reveive pins of MAX-232 chip (RS-232), on Clock and Data pins of I2C data bus and many more electronic components. This circuit supports capturing for up to 100 kHz digital signals.”

Posted September 13, 2012 by Chris

“We have already explored how to control a servo motor using a PIC microcontroller, but this time let’s take a look at how to control a servo motor using the Arduino platform. We’re not trying to do anything extra-ordinary in this article, just trying to make the servo motor move to the specific angle that we want it to be at and stay there.”

Posted September 12, 2012 by Chris

“So being the EE that I am, this got me to thinking: wouldn’t this be even more fun if we could measure muzzle velocity? It shouldn’t be all that hard; we could just hook up a couple LEDs and photo-detectors, fire through the beams, time it with a microcontroller, and voila! So, that’s precisely what I did, except that I decided to go with a couple cheap laser diodes instead of LEDs.”

Posted September 11, 2012 by Chris

“Despite the fact that it is a really simple and cheap design, I really love this creation of a magnetic whiteboard eraser bot that’s built with Lego parts and a simple Atmel microcontroller, which acts as brain controller. Le Zhang and Michael Lathrop, both senior students at Cornell had this nice idea how to efficiently clean your professor’s whiteboard.”

Posted September 10, 2012 by Chris

“Although the virtual DIY Calculator is lots of fun, there is something satisfying about having a real machine to play with, so we’ve been pondering the idea of creating a physical version of the DIY Calculator…”

Posted September 9, 2012 by Chris

“My idea was really simple: I would make a circuit that would fully discharge each of the batteries while measuring how much energy it produced…I had an Arduino and an LCD panel left over from a different project so I thought I’d make a standalone unit.”

Posted September 8, 2012 by Chris

“I’ve recently had success in making a conductive ink using a fine copper powder suspended in an acrylic airbrush medium. This paper on conductive epoxies was really the key to getting this ink working….There is still quite a bit of experimentation to be done, but this is a very encouraging result!”

Posted September 7, 2012 by Chris

“Easy build and use, the general purpose Big LED with SPI serial interfacing. Expandable for multiple digits but still uses only three wires for receiving data from any uC boards.”

Posted September 6, 2012 by Chris

“In the past I have built many, many VGA based projects,, but never with Arduino and so, in this article, we will use the Arduino UNO platform to simulate VGA signals using straight C code. This doesn’t even come close to how video card designers do it, but it’s a fun exercise in seeing how well we understand the timing of the Arduino and AVR microcontroller as well as the VGA protocol.”

Posted September 5, 2012 by Chris

“Robots are becoming a common educational resource. Together with other applied science fields like wearable computing, or music instrument design, robotics provides an alternative door into traditional fields like math and physics, as well as into more contemporary ones like computer science and complex systems.”