301 Moved Permanently

Posted July 17, 2014 by Chris

The topic for this week’s lesson in FPGA and CPLD land is: Lesson 4: Combinatorial Logic. This lesson is part of our new PyroEDU course: An Introduction to CPLD and FPGA. Here’s an overview of the lesson:

"In the Introduction to Digital Electronics course, we explored AND, OR, NOT, NOR and other logic gates. Now we’ll harness the power of programmed logic to dynamically create and use these gates in a CPLD."

Posted July 14, 2014 by Chris

"The device records audio captured by a microphone at a sample rate of 8000Hz, it is stored into 8bit volatile SRAM, and then replayed out of a speaker, it is controlled via CMOS 4000 logic.
It takes up 4 full breadboards, and requires -5, 0, 5 and 12v supplies. All chips are DIL."

Posted July 13, 2014 by Chris

"This is beyond OBDII readers, but not exactly iOS and Android apps like Torque. This segment is defined as being a permanent or semi-permanent installation. I reserve the right to keep this definition a “moving target” so as to keep it differentiated from smartphone and tablet apps ;-)."

Posted July 12, 2014 by Chris

"I did some more scrounging to create a mini Locnar using the LEDs from a Glade Light Show air freshener. The wall wart had previously been scrounged from this air freshener for the bread board power supply. Now we reuse part of the circuit board with the LEDs combined with what we learned in the Ping Pong Ball diffuser project to create a color changing orb."

Posted July 11, 2014 by Chris

"This is a conduction tester to check the connection on the built proto-board. Normally a circuit tester is used to check the conduction. But it is not suitable to check if wired or not in the circuit board with mounted parts because the semiconductor parts in the circuit become conductive under test voltage."

Posted July 10, 2014 by Syd

This week we’re moving on to Lesson 3: Input & Output in our new PyroEDU course: An Introduction to CPLD and FPGA. Here’s an overview of the lesson:

"All FPGA and CPLD devices have general purpose input and output pins, often called GPIO. Here we will take a look at how to build a CPLD image and hardware to accept push-button input in order to affect output LEDs."

Posted July 9, 2014 by Syd

Jameco Electronics is giving away free electronic components on a weekly basis starting this Friday July 11th! The free parts are awarded on a first-come first-served basis so be sure to check Jameco Free Fridays every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time for your chance to win!

Posted July 8, 2014 by Chris

"The purpose of this project was to design and implement a digital stethoscope to serve as a platform for potential computer aided diagnosis applications for the detection of cardiac murmurs. The system uses a custom-built sensor to capture heart sounds at 8 kHz and converts them to electrical signals to be processed by an ATmega644 microcontroller."

Posted July 7, 2014 by Chris

"My first Physical Computing class assignment for this summer was to create a bicycle computer. This is a device that you stick on your bike and it tells you how fast you are going, what your speed is, etc. Following is how I made my own bicycle computer."

Posted July 5, 2014 by Chris

"Each anchor is connected to a motorshield via Ethernet cables and the shield is mounted to an Arduino. I located a copy of the firmware on Github and started editing it with AVR Studio. Once I implemented the necessary geometry modifications, I used a program called XLoader to flash the new firmware over to the Atmel chip."