FRIC at ivoidwarranties has developed an Arduino addiction. So when his company needed a replacement time clock he wasn’t content to settle for a substandard commercial unit. In the true hacker spirit he designed his own superior time clock system using Arduino and a Stronglink SL018. The SL018 is an RFID reader/writer that interfaces via […]
Author Archives: the machinegeek
DCC 2011: FUNCube project development
The FUNcube Dongle is a SDR receiver on a USB dongle which currently sells for $125 GPB. It uses the same E4000 tuner found in the $20 RTL-SDR dongle we’ve posted about previously. The developer is Howard Long, G6VLB, who chronicled the FUNCube’s development in the above video from the 2011 Digital Communications Conference hosted […]
RTL-SDR APCO Project 25 (P25) receiver
Balint Seeber has done it again! In this video he shows how to take the RTL-SDR dongle and use it in conjunction with the open source OP25 project to successfully demodulate APCO Project 25 (P25) digital radio voice communications. P25 is a term used to refer to a modulation system used by many public safety […]
ATMega88 based LCFesR meter
Ben Eishen sent in this link. He says, “I have been thinking about building an ESR meter, and this one looks like a winner.” The design is based on the ATMega88 and according to the designer, Dr. Le Hung, “The LCFesR 4.0 unit is a precise, wide range meter that can measure inductivity, capacity, frequency […]
TIDeals: eZ430-Chronos watch again
If you missed it before, TI is offering the Chronos Watch as their current week’s deal at $24.50. The eZ430 deal includes the wireless enabled watch, CC1111 USB RF access point, and a CD containing software and documentation. A welcome change by TI is the elimination of the deal coupon codes. TI is now fulfilling […]
Unofficial Google image search by drawing
Franz Enzenhofer has put together this novel search-by-image page for use with Google. This is Franz’s own work and is not affiliated with or supported by Google. He’s confirmed it works on Chrome, Safari, Firefox on Mac and Firefox on Windows XP. It does not work on mobile devices.
14 ways to contribute to open source
If you’re not a world-class coder, can you still make a meaningful contribution to the open source community? Andy Lester of Software Quality Connection has written an article outlining 14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star. He points out various ways — some obvious, some not […]
Verilog project: Binary to 7-segment display
DJ Delorie was looking for an excuse to learn about Verilog and CPLDs. So he coded up this binary to 7-segment display converter. He provides links to the source code and says this project fits into the Xilinx XC9572 (the same chip used in our Coolrunner-II CPLD breakout board. You can get our XC9572XL dev-board […]
RTL-SDR GNU Radio update
While we await the arrival of the Ezcap dongle from DealExtreme we found this video from Balint Seeber. He’s made using this device with GNU Radio even easier by coding up a source block for use with GNU Radio Companion.
Chaotic Moon Labs’ Board of Imagination
At CES 2012 Chaotic Moon Labs debuted the Board of Awesomeness, a motorized skateboard which was controlled based upon readings from a Kinect. Now the CML crew has taken the concept one step further with their Board of Imagination. The BOI is similar to the Board of Awesomeness except that control is based upon brain […]
Learn phonemic speech synthesis for the Propeller
This tutorial from Parallax explains speech synthesis for the Propeller chip. The circuit is simply a speaker plugged into the audio jack on the Propeller Board of Education (though any Propeller dev board should work; the demo program assumes the speaker is connected to Pin 10.) The demo is known as SimpleTalk.spin and uses the […]
Atmel University Program Kicks Off 2012 Robotics Contest
The 2012 Atmel Robotics Contest (ARC) is currently underway. The contest is open to university students 18 years or older in North America, South America and Europe, and the goal is to develop a battery-powered 3D version of the Atmel robot ‘Mel’ (pictured above) using Arduino’s 4WD platform (for example, see Seeedstudio’s version) and Atmel […]
Netgear hack note
Lloyd Atkinson writes: I was recently researching the possibility of running OpenWRT on one of my Netgear Wireless access points. I came across a Netgear page that has available TAR files of source code for hundreds of their devices! So far, it appears that Netgear uses BusyBox Linux on their devices. I just thought some […]
Atmel AT90SC3232CS smartcard destruction
Flylogic is known for their skills in reverse engineering chips. They were familiar with Atmel smartcards AT90SC3232 and AT90SC3232C and assumed that the AT90SC3232CS was similar but with an extra IO pad. They discovered the AT90SC3232CS is a completely new design based on the larger AT90SC6464C device, Get all the fascinating details on the exploration […]
IETF 83
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is currently meeting in Paris, France, throuch March 30, 2012. “The mission of the IETF is to make the Internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet.” The IETF Meeting known as IETF 83 has their […]
Arduino voice control with EasyVR shield
If you want to add voice recognition to your next Arduino project, you might want to consider the EasyVR Shield by VeeaR. It’s based on the EasyVR module, and combined with supporting libraries provides up to 32 user-defined Speaker Dependent triggers (in any language) or commands and voice passwords. The shield makes available three controllable […]
MSP430: using ACLK and the 32kHz crystal
NJC was designing a home automation system, to control lights at preset intervals. He wanted to use the MSP430 Launchpad but found the high frequency clock source of the valueline MCU to be insufficiently accurate. He wrote this post on the MSP430 Launchpad Blog detailing how to install the 32.768kHz crystal and run an ACLK […]
MAKE How-To: Get Started with the BeagleBone
Matt Richardson from MAKE provides this introduction to the BeagleBone dev board. BeagleBone is an TI AM3358 ARM Cortex-A8-based microprocessor board that ships with a 2GB microSD card with the Angstrom Linux Distribution with node.js and Cloud9 IDE. It retails for $89 from MAKE and Adafruit.
Human birdwings project: the only thing real was the Seeeduino
UPDATED: The Human Birdwings project is an elaborate hoax, the brainchild of possibly one Jarno Smeets, an alleged mechanical engineer from the Netherlands. His stated goal was to build a set of functional human birdwings similar to those conceived by Leonardo Davinci. Tinito was watching the above installment from the 14-video series and discovered that […]
Introducing RTL-SDR: a $20 SDR
If you don’t want to spend $1,200+ for a USRP SDR to use GNU Radio the crew at OsmoSDR want to help. In addition to their other amazing work, Osmocom team members (notably Steve Markgraf) have been hacking away on an alternative least-cost solution they call rtl-sdr. So what is rtl-sdr? It is a creative […]