This little robot by Ted Larson packs a bunch of processing power which is spread across 10 PIC processors! “This robot is turning into a reusable platform that could be used for more than the tabletop challenge….perhaps even a Trinity fire-fighter! Here is a shot of the board stack that Bob and I designed for this robot. Lots of MCU processing horsepower in there. All total there are 10 PIC’s
Oliver Kreylos from UC Davis has built on the hacked Kinect drivers that was released last week. His work is truly amazing and it demonstrates just the start of the possibilities of the Kinect. I can see companies spinning out some new products that build a device that relies on the Kinect as the main data acquisition portion. Just imagine placing someone on a chair and give them a spin in
YourITronics has a good article on making a Constant Current Source using a Texas Instruments TPS54232 chip.The TSP 54232 is a flexible little chip but you will need to get out the fine pitch soldering iron tip and cut down on the coffee since it is only available in a surface mount package. There is an interesting DIY thermal via system that is used on the board to allow the
Felipe La Rotta from Engallamientos de La Rotta has built a number of cool DIY projects, this DIY Bench Power Supply is one of my favorites. Everyone who is tinkers with electronics will eventually need to progress from a battery as a power supply to a plug in wall wart then eventually to variable supply. This DIY supply quite a good variable supply since it is based on a computer
Thanks to Gadget Factory for putting up the prize this week. They are providing a Papilio Barcode Genie kit to the lucky winner of the contest, simply plug in your scanner and increase your productivity. Of course the hardware is completely hackable so you could really make it do whatever you would like it to do! If you can’t wait to get one you are in luck, they on sale
We have seen what the inside of a Kinect looks like, now we can interface to the cool box if electronic bits. Hector Martin apparently hacked some code together and got it working 3 hours after he got his hands in the Kinect! From what I see this thing has tons of potential. The Wiimote Hacks were being created at a fast and furious pace after it was opened and
Brad from Brads Electronic Projects shows us how to make 8 RGB LEDs create a large circular display. He uses a spread sheet to create the HEX data that the PIC microcontroller will be using to turn on the RGB LEDs to make the system display what you would like but the display data is stored on an EPROM to allow for large moving displays. Reminds me a bit of
