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Apple Remote Shield for the Arduino

January 24, 2012 by Chris
“Awhile back I was working on a project that that I wanted to be able to start music the on my mac through the IR receiver. After a while of looking around I found this library which allows you to use your arduino as an Apple Remote. I integrated it in to my project and it worked great! So the other day I decided to make an Apple Remote shield for my arduino.”

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Tic-Tac-Toe Playing Robotic Arm

January 23, 2012 by Chris
“Our project is a twenty four and half inch aluminum frame robotic arm with four degrees of freedom. In our project we made the arm the second player in the classic game of Tic-Tac-Toe to demonstrate its repeatable motion. The arm consists of five servo motors, four to control the motion and one to control the end effecter (gripper). The arm moves tic-tac-toe pieces onto a board for its opponent and itself to give the user interactive control over the arm.”

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Outdoor Motion Sensing Light Controller

January 22, 2012 by Chris
“Those days when I come home at night and straight into the darkness are finally over. This is a very practical device and I built it so that it is a module to my Dual Channel IR Remote Control. Because of that I ended up with a definite overkill of what is supposed to be a simple switch with a timer when I open/close my door. Anyway, it is modular+wireless and that's what I like.”

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Toy Car Inverted Pendulum Balancer

January 21, 2012 by Chris
“The inverted pendulum balancer is a radio controlled car modified by adding a plexiglass platform and an inverted pendulum with free rotating pivot. The electrical component of the balancer brings together computational hardware (Atmel Mega32 MCU), an input angle sensor (US Digital Optical Encoder), and an output motor driver (NI LMD18200 H-Bridge) onto a single board whose sole purpose is to autonomously control the motion of the car in order to keep the pendulum from falling.”

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NES On-A-Chip via FPGA

January 20, 2012 by Chris
“My goal was to implement an older embedded system entirely in VHDL. I chose the NES due to its complexity and variety of subsystems. The idea is to prove that chips can be modeled in VHDL and synthesized on an FPGA to replace either single ICs in old systems or the systems themselves.”

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Fading LEDs via PWM

January 19, 2012 by Chris
A very neat feature that PWM (pulse with modulation) offers is being able to control the brightness level of LEDs. By varying the duty cycle percentage, we can control the exact brightness of any LED. This article takes you through a simple example design step-by-step using a PIC microcontroller. The end result is an LED controller that can set an LED to 100 unique brightness levels.

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Unibot – 3D Stabilization

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.”

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Contact-less Infrared Digital Tachometer

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.”

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PACKit – Serial to Ethernet Development System

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.”

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PIC18F4620 Embedded Websockets

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.”

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