Posted April 13, 2013 by Chris

“The PICkit™ 2 Programmer/Debugger is a low-cost development tool with an easy to use interface for programming and debugging Microchip’s Flash families of microcontrollers. The full featured Windows programming interface supports baseline, mid-range, PIC18,8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit microcontrollers, and many Microchip Serial EEPROM products.”

Posted April 12, 2013 by Chris

“RC model helicopter prices have reached a point where all sorts of challenging (i.e. crash-prone) robotics projects become affordable. This document explains how to build a 300 g helicopter with embedded Linux and Bluetooth datalink from off-the shelf components for less than 500 EUR.”

Posted April 11, 2013 by Chris

Continuing with our new course: An Introduction To Digital Electronics, this week we’ll learn some more on the theory side of digital electronics with Lesson 4: Kmaps. Here is what this week’s lesson is all about:

Moving beyond number systems and logic gates, we have boolean equations and karnaugh maps. In this lesson we will learn two methods for simplifying logic circuits using boolean equations and kmaps and then we will implement the circuits to verify our math. This lesson is a tough one, so get your brain ready to be jammed full with information.

Posted April 10, 2013 by Chris

“This tutorial details the process of building a line following robot. The robot can follow both black and white lines. It uses a sensor array to sense the line and a PID control to follow the line.”

Posted April 9, 2013 by Chris

“In this article we will take a close look at the Tenma 72-7737 digital multimeter. Specifically, we’ll test out some of the more important functions of the multimeter, we’ll take a look inside to see what drives the multimeter, we’ll test out the PC interface and we’ll draw some conclusions based off of the overall experience.”

Posted April 8, 2013 by Chris

“I have tried two different types of etching for PCBs: the bubble tank and the shallow dish method….The shallow dish method involves finding a small shallow dish and filling it with just enough etchant to cover the board. I measure out about 250ml each time. To etch, the tray is placed in a tub of hot water and agitated back and forward, while I inhale the fumes from the tank. Eek! Hence the need for a mechanical solution.”

Posted April 7, 2013 by Chris

“We decided to create a virtual archery game for our ECE 4760 final project. This game consists of an ATmega1284P microcontroller, a TV for display, and multiple pieces of hardware. All of these devices communicate together to simulate a three-round game of archery with a target that is 20 feet away from the user.”

Posted April 6, 2013 by Chris

“…when you have to program many chips, repeatedly reconnecting the programming cable quickly becomes a chore. So when I found an article about constructing a programming pen that would help solve both of these problems, I decided to build one for myself…”

Posted April 5, 2013 by Chris

“My code uses some features of the Arduino software suite and some of the low-level hardware code derived from the PIC headers. This allows rapid development of the slow user-interface parts of the system (control input and score display) whilst allowing the video generation in real time by using the low-level hardware controls.”

Posted April 4, 2013 by Chris

Last week we introduced you to the Binary and Decimal number systems in our new course: An Introduction To Digital Electronics. This week, we’ll continue forward using binary with digital logic in Lesson 3: Logic Gates. Here is what this week’s lesson is all about:

The fundamental representation of digital hardware comes in a symbol form, called logic gates. These gates perform boolean algebra in a visual way that leads to what are called logic diagrams. In this lesson, we’ll learn the basic logic gates of digital electronics and experiment with them to make sure they do what they should.