Last week was the Toronto Maker Faire. The entire faire can be divided into 4 major categories: 3D Printers, RGB LED strips, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi. Don’t take that generalization negatively, the entire faire was great. Most of the projects would beat our university symposium projects.
Monthly Archives: September 2013
AVR Timer Calculator
This is a simple javascript calculator I wrote to help me make timing calculations while working with the timers on AVR microcontrollers. The same calculations applies for all microcontrollers but the prescaler options only contain the ones possible on an AVR microcontroller (the configuration number is indicated in the brackets).
Javascript must be enabled on this page for the calculator to work. Choose what value you want to use as input by pressing the button beside the textbox(es) you want to use as the input. The output will be reflected in the other textboxes.
Weekly Report Sept 22 2013
No post for last week because I didn’t have anything interesting to say.
Hacked my Rigol DS1052E to the 100 MHz firmware. Continue reading
Weekly Report September 8 2013
Stupid Rigol o’scope has the USB port upside down… It also doesn’t support my 16 GB thumbdrive which is another disappointment. I wish it had Eye-Fi like my camera.
I got native code baked into Netduino Plus 2’s firmware, so now I can run real time tasks without any interruptions or preemptions. Continue reading
Turnigy ESC Programming Card Reverse Engineered
I replicated the functionality of a Turnigy ESC programming card. These programming cards are meant to configure electronic speed controllers (ESC). I always wanted to know how they work. Eventually I purchased one since I need one for my quadrotor helicopter’s ESC, and then I started playing with it.
It should be very simple to adapt the code to any microcontroller.
MP3 Alarm Clock Tutorial
LED Pocket Watch
This is a LED pocket watch. It has 12 LEDs to show the hour, 60 LEDs to show the minute, and 60 LEDs to show the second. The LEDs are arranged in three rings. There is a button on the top to activate the pocket watch, and a button on the back to change modes and settings.
The battery is a rechargable lithium ion coin cell battery and it is charged from a micro USB connector. The battery life depends on how heavily the pocket watch is used, but if you leave it alone, it is estimated to last several months. There is a low battery indication feature. This pocket watch also feature a buzzer and a vibration motor, which are used for the alarm feature, and the motor causes a short “tick” as each second passes by. The pocket watch is constructed of a PCB, two pieces of laser cut clear acrylic plastic, and a 3D printed casing.
Click Me!! More instructions, pictures, animations, and videos.
USB Business Card
Weekly Report September 1
I’ve been playing with a nRF dev kit from Nordic Semiconductors. The bad news is that they require a product key to access downloads. The kind-of-good news is that their code is designed to be compiled under Eclipse with GCC (hurray for open source). The bad news is that they’ve designed the files to use assumed toolchain install paths, their makefile literally says:
ifeq ($(findstring 86, $(ProgramFiles)), ) PROGFILES := C:/Program Files else PROGFILES := C:/Program Files (x86) endif GNU_INSTALL_ROOT := $(PROGFILES)/GNU Tools ARM Embedded/4.7 2013q1 |
So… it only works on the default install path of “GNU Tools ARM Embedded”, and only works for one version. Continue reading