301 Moved Permanently

Posted November 28, 2011 by Chris

If you’ve ever wanted to build the famous ball and plate balancing project, here’s the project with some great documentation. A PC tells an Arduino how to move two servos which move the marble across the board where you want it to go. A webcam tells the PC where the ball is on the board. Take a look!

Posted November 25, 2011 by Chris

“This is a Macintosh 512k which I upgraded to run OS X by replacing the innards with a modern Mac Mini and various supporting components, including a grayscale CRT monitor, an LS-120 floppy disk drive, and a microcontroller-based USB device that interfaces the Mini to the original keyboard and mouse. Why? Mainly because I wanted to experiment with creating a custom USB device.”

Posted November 24, 2011 by Chris

We’ll post-pone the final Taming Your Music Collection tutorial until next week in order to take some time and celebrate Thanksgiving. Happy Holidays and here’s a TurkeyShield to celebrate:“In the DIY spirit, of course, here’s a 5-step guide to making your own 8-bit embedded turkey:”

Posted November 23, 2011 by Chris

“Made from Dremel drill and drill press. I removed the bottom plate & mounted the column to the back with U-bolts. Acrylic is so easy to work with. It can be cut, drilled milled & glued and it’s very strong, doesn’t warp or break easily. The design is the same as the big PCB drills, the table moves, not the drill head. With the exception the real machine tables I’ve worked around ride on air.”

Posted November 22, 2011 by Chris

“The project intends to accomplish all computational tasks for the fractal sets using the embedded PowerPC 440 RISC CPU, ultimately for characterization of the CPU-based processing performance. If, in the end, the computational performance lacks significantly for the intended application, selected computational tasks might still be offloaded from the CPU to hardware-based processing.”

Posted November 21, 2011 by Chris

“The PC based Soundcard Oscilloscope receives its data from the Soundcard with 44.1kHz and 16 Bit resolution. The data source can be selected in the Windows mixer (Microphone, Line-In or Wave). The frequency range depends on the sound card, but 20-20000Hz should be possible with all modern cards. ”

Posted November 19, 2011 by Chris

If you are looking to make some autonomously controlled flying objects, a blimp is steady and slow way to get started. This article shows you how one team modified a toy blimp’s electronics to add some intelligence and autonomy to its flight.

Posted November 18, 2011 by Chris

“We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were female).” Here’s an interesting read about the growing prevalence of women in the STEM world.

Posted November 17, 2011 by Chris

“Most mp3 files have at least some ID3 tags filled in. Most commonly, the Title and Artist are filled in. We’ll use these two bits of information to look up the rest of the information about the mp3 file (Track Number and Album).”

Posted November 16, 2011 by Chris

“RDS? It’s an abbreviation for Radio Data System. RDS is a European standard for sending small amounts of digital information using conventional FM radio…..To understand the RDS digital format I need to play with it. That is easier to do in C++ than with PIC assembler. I’ll use a 16F84 PIC as an interface. RDS data are sent serially to a PC com port for further investigation.”