Sean Chen and Yunchi Luo packed some cool 3D Pong Game Play into 3 Altera DE2 Development boards. Two digital cameras have their composite outputs feeding into the game hardware. They are using the image in the game and the system is monitoring the image for the colored paddles. These represent just one of the many great ECE 5760 projects. Thanks Bruce “The game software runs on a third DE2
Many of us use transistors everyday but don’t take the time to think about how the magic works. Bill Hammack explains how a replica of the first transistor works. “Bill uses a replica of the point contact transistor built by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen at Bell Labs. On December 23, 1947 they used this device to amplify the output of a microphone and thus started the microelectronics revolution that
Magnetic Swipe Cards are used everywhere, probably the most common one that we all have in our wallets is the one that is built into our bank and credit cards. Craig from the Flashing LEDs blog was had a reader that was sitting around with no purpose. He swiped his University ID through it and found that the only thing on track 2 was university ID number, this card system
If you ever wanted to connect your microcontroller project to a VGA monitor this AVR Microcontroller VGA Output project by LucidScience will contain lots of great information. The bare bones part of the project is very interesting to see how little is needed to interface with VGA. A free port and a few resistors and diodes is all that was needed. To generate better quality images read further into the
Doug Smith demonstrates how to use Pulse Injection to find problems with printed circuit boards. He built a small probe that allows him to poke around all areas of the board to see if there is any areas which are sensitive. This method is probably not economical for a hobbyist to use unless you can find the Fisher PG EFT that Doug used in the Apex Electronics bone yard for
I am sure most of you have heard about Sparkfun. They were the ones that had the huge giveaway earlier this year. Nathan Seidle created this 10 million per year company from some humble beginnings. It was funny to hear about the the process Nathan went through to get his merchant account. After he applied to get a merchant account and the company sent him a disposable camera as part
Forgetting a babies inside a locked vehicle is an unfortunate event which occurs far too often. Daniel Ogilvie, Peggy Liska and Michael Sherman have developed a solution which puts some TI tech into motion. They developed the SafeBABI concept while interning at TI. Nice that TI allowed them to work on a concept that they have no interest in ever monetizing. One of their cool eZ430 watches is used to
