Dave from the EEVblog has a great video about measuring battery capacity. Most of us will create a product or project one day that will run from batteries and this video will help you determine a good battery match. Check out the cool Gossen Metrawatt Metrahit Energy multimeter that Dave uses to get the battery readings! I don’t feel sorry for Dave sweating in the Australian heat since I froze
Once you are finished entering the weekly Hacked Gadgets contest you will want to have a look at this one. Remember the contest we ran back in October last year? No matter if you were one of the people who figured out that it was a 555 timer or if you needed to work on it for a bit. Now is your change to put that chip to some good
Looking for a powerful open source PIC microcontroller based platform that is built with wireless sensors and communication in mind? Look no further, today OpenPicus has been launched. A free IDE, inexpensive hardware and a great Italian team all points to great success. If you are a student make sure you have your microcontroller instructor drop the OpenPicus team an email requesting your free Campus Kit. Next time I am
The Paro Therapeutic Robot was at CES 2011. This looks like a toy that your kids would play with but it is actually a very sophisticated robot. It is full of sensors that allow it to sense touch, bright lights and voice. Just like a pet you can call Paro by name and he will eventually relate that name to be his name. Paro is used in nursing homes, hospitals,
Microinfinity had a great booth for us hackers and hobbyists at CES 2011. Lauro had a LEGO NXT robot getting commands from a laptop to draw a line drawing of Mona Lisa, the LEGO robot is using their CruizCore® XG1300L MEMS gyroscope. The MEMS gyroscope is very accurate and is sure to be a great addition to the sensors available to LEGO NXT hobbyists. You can purchase the XG1300L sensor
Very often when you are building a project there are two discreet sections. How do we go about powering everything up? Just use some good old copper wires right? That’s a good solution when the sections are fixed together but what happens when one section is rotating, in this case we can use power slip ring connectors but that is not very elegant. Alan Yates had this issue when he
When using a microcontroller one of the most important feature to use is the internal non-volatile memory. This will allow you to store information that might be needed to store user selected features or system variables that need to persist power cycling. Interfacing with the EEPROM will depend on the microcontroller you are using. In this case it is an Atmega168. Our friend Daniel Garcia from Prostack has put together
