When someone rings your doorbell wouldn’t it be nice to know about it when you aren’t home? Well this project will do just that. Pressing the doorbell will send a message to your cell phone and send you a picture of who is there. You often hear that robbers often ring the doorbell to make sure no one is at home before breaking in. I am thinking that a
The ECE 4760 Final Projects are here! Check out this DIY Digital Saxophone that was designed by Brian Wang. His design uses an omni directional microphone that is mounted in a tube to reduce background noise. The player blows into the tube and the microphone pics up the wind noise to know when the player is blowing. This signal is amplified and fed into a microcontroller. Buttons are positioned
 Check out this great looking Binary Burst Clock that Mike Szczys from Jumptuck has built. At first glance you might be a bit confused on how to read the clock but it is actually quite simple. Mike ordered the boards from Seeed Studios and had a good experience and it was cheap! In this design a MCP7940 RTC chip is keeping track of time with the help of
Just in time for Mothers Day. Dress up your box of boring chocolates with some blinking LEDs. This project by Dmitriy Abaimov uses an ATTiny13 programmed using the Arduino IDE to do the interesting blinking. The microcontroller doesn’t have very many pins but with a bit of Charlieplexing this project can control all 10 LED that were desired.  “By counting the possible spots for LED locations in the box,
 This Auto Dimming Incandescent Bulb that Dick Bipes built works in conjunction with Slow Starting CFL Bulbs. When he flips on the lights in his garage that has now been converted into a workshop he gets instant light from the incandescent light bulb while the compact florescents take their time to warm up (many minutes). As the CFL bulbs slowly increase in brightness the circuit that Dick made
This project by some 4th year engineering students will get them ready to build the next Segway. “This project consists of prototype lab module for Control Systems II. The purpose of this lab is to teach 4th year electrical engineering students how to implement control systems to a real life mechanical system. The controller seeks to balance the ball on the beam. It is also possible to set a
If you are getting a bit tired of driving your car manually this hack might be for you. 🙂 The guys from Waterloo Labs built this car that can be driven around using an iPhone. They are using a CompactRIO controller as the brains of the system which might be considered overkill and does come with a hefty price tag of almost two grand! Thanks to Jody for sending
