All posts on March, 2008
Posted on 18 Mar 2008
This project is an ingenious little hardware hack dreamt up by a Canadian BEAM enthusiast named Jérôme Demers. It wonderfully illustrates a number of principles of bottom-up, BEAM-friendly robotics.This project is a good example of the relatively level playing field found on the Internet for the sharing of robot designs and innovative ideas, regardless of who or where you are.This project requires some materials and parts you might already have lying around the house and some components you’ll likely need to purchase at your local electronics store.[more]
Posted on 18 Mar 2008
This project is fun for someone with intermediate to advanced electronics skills who wants to make cool sounds. It makes a great first synth project but is interesting enough for the seasoned synth person too. The board includes 1V/oct scale adjustment trimmers for the oscillators You will get a couple (maybe three) octaves of in tune scale. The Sound Lab Mini-Synth is a LOT of fun to play with and makes some very cool sounds. If you like electronic music you will definitely have fun with this. If you have a sampler you can use this unit as an analog synth sound source to make excellent samples with.[more]
Posted on 18 Mar 2008
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. Alternately, a molded power supply with a simple voltage regulator to drop the voltage to 3 volts could be used. The circuit is basically a handy flasher circuit that operates well on only 3 volts using ordinary silicon transistors. When the circuit is triggered, the buzzer is pulsed about once per second.[more]
Posted on 18 Mar 2008
Use two mirrors, two motors to move the mirrors, a laser pointer, and a PIC microcontroller with serial input to receive the image from the host computer and control the mirrors and laser. The image will be conditioned in and transferred by Processing. The result will be an image that looks a bit like a bit big POV or a red and black old style computer display.[more]
Posted on 18 Mar 2008
The .Net Oscilloscope is a Virtual Oscilloscope using PIC Microcontroller.The heart of the .NET Scope is the GP-3 PC I/O Board PIC Microcontroller circuit. This is a kit brought from AWC that allows you to read digital an analog signals and return the results through the serial port of your PC. You can also create PWM signals, tones, high/low signals, pulses, and counters with GP-3 circuit and control them with your PC.[more]