301 Moved Permanently

Posted March 3, 2013 by Chris

“The goal of our project was to create both the hardware and software platform that can be used as a adaptable haptic data visualization device. Imagine you have a complex data set from which you create a surface plot in MATLAB….what if you could feel it? Bring it to life? With our current haptic visualizer, users can feel any arbitrary surface plot generated in MATLAB…”

Posted March 2, 2013 by Chris

“The power supply distribution block (PSD) contains a 6 outlet surge protected power strip, emergency stop button, 5VDC wall wart, 7.5DCV wall wart, 9VDC wall wart, and a 12VDC wall wart. The purpose of this block it to supply power to all the systems of the machine.”

Posted March 1, 2013 by Chris

“In this guide we will show you how to make a simple antweight R/C combat robot using a Sabertooth 2X5 R/C. The bot doesn’t necessarily have to be used in combat – it is a pretty fun toy to drive around the office too! There is a certain satisfaction you get from driving your own homemade vehicle that you can’t get from an imported Walmart toy.”

Posted February 28, 2013 by Chris

“In this article we will take a look at the original, The Annoy, project, and see what we can do to improve it. Specifically, we’ll make a PCB for the project and find the smallest PIC package available (10F202) for it making it as small as possible. Additionally, we’ll switch over and use microchip’s new XC8 compiler so we don’t have to use assembly for programming.”

Posted February 27, 2013 by Chris

“Experimentation and perseverance help. It’s ok if you goof up a few times; I did. Hang in there and you’ll be a DIY pcb etching guru soon! Find out what works for you, and you’re set. Start with a small, simple circuit and stick to single sided traces! My first circuit was for a 12V/5V dual power supply circuit for another project. It uses only a handful of components.”

Posted February 26, 2013 by Chris

“Rock Band 2 (RB2) and Guitar Hero World Tour (GHWT) both work with the drum set controller that is packaged with GHWT. The GHWT drums, unlike the RB2 drums, is plugged into a Wiimote’s expansion port. This expansion port is a I2C bus and the drum is a I2C slave device. An AVR microcontroller can be connected on this bus as a I2C slave with the same slave address to trick the Wii into thinking that it’s connected to a drum controller.”

Posted February 25, 2013 by Chris

“A gadget that I demonstrate today is a portable autonomous barcode scanner built using an Arduino board, USB Host shield, handheld USB barcode scanner and LCD display. The operation is simple – when handheld scanner button is pressed, it scans the barcode and sends it to the Arduino symbol by symbol. The Arduino then outputs these symbols on LCD display.”

Posted February 24, 2013 by Chris

“This project seeks to develop an additional form of authentication for vehicle security, specifically in the form of a tapped password. The goal of this project is to implement this form of authentication and determine the level of possible security while maintaining enough flexibility to allow human variation in password inputs.”

Posted February 23, 2013 by Chris

“Start with a cheap bathroom scale from ikea, then strip out all the hardware except for the load cells. Add in the following: a microcontroller, roving networks bluetooth serial module, 24 bit ADC, 4 AA batteries, a linear regulator and input ORing diodes.”

Posted February 22, 2013 by Chris

“I spent part of an afternoon developing a hardware RSS reader (most of my time was spent on the python side of things). It’s pretty simple and uses an AVR microcontroller connected to a computer via a serial cable.”