Posted July 17, 2017 by Chris

"For the past few months, my friends and I have been planning to make our own laser tag system that we can play at home. The goal is to make a laser tag system that we can modify and program different game modes. Why are we doing his? We just want to play some laser tag, and learn a couple of things along the way."

Posted July 14, 2017 by Chris

"Sleep deprivation has been driving me mad recently. And it’s all down to a new member of the family, our new dog. She barks at night when she’s left out. She barks early in the morning when she’s left in. So once I recognized the patterns of her barking, I realized that all I needed was something that would let her out when she needed to go for a pee, usually around 6:30 in the morning."

Posted July 11, 2017 by Chris

".Anyway, Luke Miller over at FPGA Expert recently bought a vintage pickup truck and wanted to trick it out a bit with some custom electronics. He decided to use GPS to measure speed rather than hooking the speedometer directly up to the truck’s sensors, this way the project could be replicated on any make/ model of vehicle. Luke is using a Pmod GPS receiver which he is then running through his Basys2 Spartan-3E FPGA board to make this thing work.quot;

Posted July 5, 2017 by Chris

"This bot was designed in Autodesk Inventor, and machined from 5052 alloy aircraft aluminum using a Sherline 2000 CNC and some work from Rapid Sheet Metal. He stands 62cm tall, weighs about 5kg and uses a total of 10x EX-106+, 6x RX-64s, and 8x RX-28s."

Posted July 2, 2017 by Chris

"Waking up in the morning is a daily and early task. Throughout my life I have used different ways of waking up: the usual alarm clock connected to a high power siren and flashing lights, a high power buzzer fed by AA batteries hooked to a portable alarm clock, and of course the most used is the mobile phone alarm."

Posted June 29, 2017 by Chris

"I was motivated to find a new solution to controlling my garage door because I didn’t want to carry an extra remote around, and they just don’t work very well. This article demontrates how to use a CC3200 to connect to an existing garage door opener. The CC3200 acts as a TCP server which can send information about the garage door state to any network capable device."

Posted June 26, 2017 by Chris

"This rain detector will give you a heads-up the instant it starts to rain, hopefully giving you time to close windows and bring in possessions. The battery-powered circuit draws virtually no current when the sensor is dry and the current consumption is low when the buzzer is activated so a couple of AA cells will last a long time."

Posted June 23, 2017 by Chris

"Having good support for your arm/hand when operating these large sticks makes it a lot more comfortable, ergonomic and gives an accurate control. The major drawback is that it isn’t possible to carry or hold it without some sort of harnesses or extra support."

Posted June 14, 2017 by Chris

"An important factor with the decisions on hardware has been to get the minimum possible host hardware to support the graphics cards. Since mining on a CPU is impractical we have chosen the cheapest available motherboard with 5 PCI-Express slots (of any type x1 – x16) and configured with the least expensive CPU possible."

Posted June 11, 2017 by Chris

"My original “Deer Repellent/ Seismic Sensor” recommended using a speaker with a weight glued to the cone as a vibration sensor (see bottom of page) but it recently occurred to me that the speaker could supply the mass itself. By gluing a standoff to the center of the cone, an inexpensive 2″, 8 ohm speaker becomes a vibration sensor with a natural resonance below 100Hz which is quite good."