301 Moved Permanently

Posted January 18, 2012 by Chris

“The Unibot is a self balancing unicycle robot. This robot combines the principles of the famous wheeled inverted pendulum and inertia wheel pendulum. A well known application of the wheeled inverted pendulum is the Segway. The wheel on the ground is used to establish the stabilization in the y-z-plane. The wheel in the air is used to balance the robot in the x-z-plane.”

Posted January 17, 2012 by Chris

“The contact with the rotating shaft is avoided with an optical sensing mechanism that uses an infrared (IR) light emitting diode and a photo detecting diode. The IR LED transmits an infrared light towards the rotating disc and the photo detecting diode receives the reflected light beam. This special arrangement of sensors is placed at about an inch away and facing towards the rotating disc.”

Posted January 16, 2012 by Chris

“The idea of building an RS232 to Ethernet bridge seemed like a great way to begin learning about embedded system design. Having created a working sample, though it was left with my teammate after graduation, I decided to recreate the project with more features and higher reliability. The project was later renamed from ‘STEDS’ to ‘NI-1’ (Network Interface 1) and finally ‘Pack-it’. Pack-it is based on a Motorola MC9S12 MCU and a CS8900A Cirrus Ethernet controller.”

Posted January 15, 2012 by Chris

“This project enables your MCU to communicate in real time to a web browser. I started this project after seeing a similar implementation on hackaday from mbed.org. Their implementation uses their own device, the mbed Cortex-M0 beta. I’ve been a hobbyist microchip PIC developer for a few years, so I set out to write my own version for microchip’s 8bit pic devices in C. The microcontroller used is a microchip PIC18F4620.”

Posted January 14, 2012 by Chris

“The dsPIC runs on the internal oscillator of 7.37MHz, which is then raised close to 30MHz using the PLL. This enables the board to run without external oscillators and associated loading capacitors. The signal to be analyzed is passed through a high impedance resistor (1Mohms) and then amplified by opamp (TL084). This is done to avoid any high voltage damaging the dsPIC or associated circuit. DC offset is added to the signal to enable it to be measured by ADC (0V to 5V).”

Posted January 13, 2012 by Chris

“AeroQuad hardware typically consists of an Arduino MCU as the flight controller board and an AeroQuad shield with various sensors, such as an accelerometer and gyroscope. AeroQuad software is written in C and uploaded to the MCU via the Arduino IDE. It currently supports an Acrobatic Mode that uses only the gyroscope for flight assistance, and a Stable Mode that uses the gyroscope and accelero-meter for leveled flight assist.”

Posted January 12, 2012 by Chris

     The Altera UP2 Dev Board may be a bit antiquated but it still provides an awesome learning platform for under- grad university students.     This week’s article will introduce 4 of the final projects from California State University Chico’s EECE 343 course: Computer Interface Circuits. Each final project has a video of the project in action as well as the FPGA source code available for download.

Posted January 11, 2012 by Chris

“Free Day is the time when SparkFun gives back to our community and customers.This year we’re giving away $200,000 to 2,000 lucky people, one hundred dollars at a time. When you fill out the captcha above (to prove you’re a human), a request is sent to our servers where there is a Geiger tube hooked up. If the Geiger tube detects a particle of ionizing radiation during your request, you win! It’s truly random! ”

Posted January 10, 2012 by Chris

“This was a second-year Embedded Systems Application Project at university. We were given the hardware and after assembling the robot, had to write firmware for it. The PIC MCU programming was done in C. As it was the first time this course was run, objectives were not concrete and were updated as students progressed. Some of the objectives were: follow a line, go over a ramp and memorize a track.”

Posted January 9, 2012 by Chris

“Each time the PCB passed at 12h00 a hall effect sensor sensed the magnet and generated an interruption. At this time, we have to check the counter to see how many ticks had been passed from this rotation since the last rotation, took this value and divided it by 360. This calculation then gives you the time between each degree.”