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TheOther1 writes:I bought a Sharp GP2Y0A21YK0F Distance Sensor to use in my robot. It was very easy to see the data returned in a serial console window, but I thought it would be cool to see the distance in zones represented by colors from a tricolor LED. Then you would not need to be connected to the computer to tell distance…[more]

This is a cheap alternative to serial LCDs. This post is based in the work made previously by tomek in wiring LCD displays using 4 bits. The basic idea is to group the 7 pins that are needed to drive the LCD in only 3 using a shift register. [more]

This circuit can be used as an amplifier to switch on and off a DC motor and to regulate its spinning speed with a PWM source generator.[more]

William writes:Moving forward in the adventures of the electrical nature - it was already time to dive into the programming side of physical computing. Lab #2 consisted of wiring up a simple circuit with a switch and a couple of LEDs and being able to program a Arduino board to process simple logic through authored code. After working through the previous lab - I found the circuit-boarding side of this lab to be far easier, even with the addition of the Arduino microprocessor, which as the time was completely foreign to me. Below are a couple of pictures of the process, plus a link to the source code for my first Arduino program.[more]

The hardware is very simple, and is based around an Arduino board that is using a bit-banging SPI technique to write data to a 100Kฮฉ digital pot (model MCP42100). Approximately 7 of the 8 bits of data actually change the value of the filter (this could be due to the resistance value of the pot).[more]