… Peweem – a small unit for to be put on a solderless breadboard to generate 0-100% PWM signals at various frequencies, it can also measure the duty cycle of incoming signals.
Artist duo Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet are developing a Knitic project, the open source knitting machine:
We are an artist duo Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet working together in the field of art and technology since 2009. We are developing Knitic project, which began as a residency project at Marginalia+Lab in Belo Horizonte, as an open hardware, which controls a knitting machine via Arduino. We don’t use a floppy emulation or knitting machine’s keypad simulation. Instead, Knitic is the new ‘brain’ of a knitting machine that allows real-time control over the needles. It means, one can knit as long patterns as desired and modify the pattern on the fly. Knitic has been tested on Brother 930 and 940. 970 should be good for Knitic. Other electronic models might need extra work for figuring out the connections and types of encoders. Maybe as well with punch-card ones, this needs to be tested and developed though. How come? Because we do not use any Brother electronics but just sensors’ output and solenoids’ input from the knitting machine.
Quiet some time ago I got a FT311D PCB from Ian. Finaly found some time to build it up and write about it. I tried it on 3 devices, each with its own quirks…
The TI CC3000 module is a self-contained Wi-Fi solution that enables
internet connectivity for a wide variety of embedded applications. According to the datasheet, the module includes a 802.11b/g integrated radio, modem, and MAC supporting WLAN communication as a BSS station with CCK and OFDM rates from 1 to 54 Mbps in the 2.4-GHz ISM band. An embedded IPv4 TCP/IP stack is also included.
The CC3000 is available from the TI estore for $35 including shipping.
I recently salvaged a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) from a piece of old test gear. The VFD is a 13 digit 7-segment multiplexed display and I thought it would look great in a custom digital clock or something similar. While it has the model number FUTABA 13-MT-54NA, I could not find any information on the internet specifically for this model.
Of course, before I could put this vacuum fluorescent display to use in my final project, I needed to first build a driver circuit to drive this display.
Kasbah posted his Nomech mini project, a 4×4 projected capactive touch board using Atmega32u4 and back-fire LEDs for each button in the project log forum:
It fits SoB 100x80mm but the top acrylic will sit right on top of the PCB as the dielectric properties of whatever is touching the electrodes matters a lot.
If this works well then I might scale it up to 8×8. I want it to work as a cheap monome replacement without using mechanical buttons; hence the name “nomech”.
SevenBlocks is a digital clock resembling a classic red on black alarm clock, featuring a mechanic seven segment display of solid blocks moving into the viewers space.
Reinis has been working on this Raspberry Pi based project for some time.
It’s about replacing stock navigation system for Volvo S80 (which does not, and will not have maps for my home country). It had a nice motorized display and buttons on steering wheel for control. I really did want everything to be as close as stock as possible. It resulted in semi-usable navigation system, which replaces stock navigation unit in trunk- no wires running from trunk to dash- steering wheel buttons conveniently generated messages on CAN bus, which I connected to in trunk.
Decided to start making good use of my “Propeller Professional Development Board” (PPDB) which has been sitting sadly idle and forlorn on the bench for a while.
Set a goal of making a simple video game with some of the advanced features available on the Propeller and this great dev board.
The first thing I wanted to get working was the bank of six 17-segment LED digits. It would be neat to have the player’s score show up in the LEDs as well as any “Insert Coin” or “Game Over” messages.
Raj writes that he’s just finished a new PC-based heart rate monitor using Arduino and Easy Pulse sensor (see previous Easy Pulse post). This project takes the sensor’s analog photo-plethysmography (PPG) output and feeds it into an Arduino ADC channel which converts it into digital counts which are then transferred to the PC through a serial interface. A PC application using the Processing programming language then displays the received PPG signal and instantaneous heart rate.
The Arduino and Processing sketches along with more project details can be found at EmbeddedLab.
Every Tuesday we give away two coupons for the free PCB drawer via Twitter. This post was announced on Twitter, and in 24 hours we’ll send coupon codes to two random retweeters.
Don’t forget there’s free PCBs three times a every week:
Hate Twitter and Facebook? Free PCB Sunday is the classic PCB giveaway. Catch it every Sunday, right here on the blog
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Facebook PCB Friday. Free PCBs will be your friend for the weekend
We’ll contact you via Twitter with a coupon code for the PCB drawer.
Limit one PCB per address per month please.
Like everything else on this site, PCBs are offered without warranty.
We try to stagger free PCB posts so every time zone has a chance to participate, but the best way to see it first is to subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.
SimpleAVR comes up with unique Launchpad projects. These include his wire clock and spectrum analyzer projects. This time he wired the CircuitCo Educational BoosterPack to a Launchpad to sample audio and have the LCD display a spectrum.
I develop this MCP23017 Brekout Board to interface a 2×16 LCD display with any microcontroller using a standard I2C bus. Typical 2×16 displays needs at least 6 lines to work (when working in 4-byte mode); in some cases, this will be prohibited for some microcontrollers. With this board, you can control it with only two lines (I2C bus) and, by the same price, obtain a few more IO’s. I use the MCP23017 I2C expander as a bridge. This integrated circuit provides 16 IO’s over a standard I2C bus. All the pins can configure as inputs or outputs independently, and supports high speed I2C (up to 1,7MHz). Also, this device has three hardware address pins that allow connecting up to 8 devices in the same bus. The rest of the features can be seen in the datasheet.
Mats has amazed us with his board a week projects, and now one of them could be yours! Today Mats is giving away four kits of Nu-Fithole and four USB breakouts, you can choose between a Mini- or Micro USB breakout.
He’ll give these away to 8 random commenters, just leave a comment on this post with your preference.
The first is for four “kits” of my new batch of Nu-Fithole boards. I ran out of the old batch so I ordered some more. I also made a XL version of it with holes ranging from 2.4 to 3.5 mm. So each of the four kits are with one Regular and one XL board.
Then I also made a big batch of the mini/micro USB breakouts. I’ll give away four of these as well. The USB mini connectors are already soldered, but you’ll have to solder the pinheader (included) yourself. The boards for this giveaway only have one row of headers, not two as on the old board.
Here is the properties of the project:
- Cheap: The component total should be below $5
- Using TI’s MSP430 line of MCUs what I’m learning now
- Able to measure till 10MHz
- Using LED display
- Able to calibrate – achieve maximum +-10Hz error at 10MHz
Lubomir Mraz and his fellow Wislab crew members have released the documentation on their open multi-platform, multi-band wireless sensor network analyzer. Known as the Open Zigbee Sniffer, the RF device interfaces with your PC via the Ethernet interface. It includes protocol dissectors for IEEE 802.15.4, Zigbee, 6LoWPAN and Atmel LightWeight Mesh, covering the 2.4GHz and 780/868/915MHz ranges, and is designed to integrate with Wireshark. The heart of sniffer is the LM3S8962 (ARM Cortex-M3) MCU, which implements 100Mbit Ethernet controller with fully PHY and MAC layer on chip. Radio interface consists of two 802.15.4 radio transceivers AT86RF212 (sub-gigahertz band) and AT86RF231 (2.4 GHz band), and includes transmit capability.
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