Educational

ChemHacker Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope Schematics and Source Released

Sacha De’Angeli from ChemHacker has released the schematics and source code of the Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope. The STM is Arduino based and has been a build in progress for quite a long time now. Looks like it is at a great state now! See the Wikipedia page for more generic information about Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscopes. “The STM is based on the concept of quantum tunneling. When a conducting

The Amp Hour - Electronics Podcast

You may remember the electronics podcast that we featured about a little more than a month ago. Back then the show had no name and only 2 episodes, since then the show has been making some great strides! Dave Jones and Chris Gammell have put another 6 one hour episodes in the can, there is also an all important name, it is now known as The Amp Hour. Thanks for

Analog LED Clock

Wellyb00t has built a cool Analog LED Clock based on a PIC 16f877 microcontroller. Given the complexity of the hand wiring the spiderweb of connections on the back of the board is beautiful. You can see more pictures including the schematic here. “*12 Dimly lit leds on outer ring showing clock outline. *LED test on powerup *16F877 PIC Microcontroller @ 20MHz *DS1307 Real Time Clock for timekeeping *169 x 700mcd

Making a Bucket Cap

The Geek Group shows us how to build a Bucket Capacitor. The process uses 12 beer bottles, I can think of a better way of emptying those bottles rather than dumping them in the bush. Looks like the crimp on connectors worked well here for Chris but I have never had much luck when crimping ring terminals onto solid wire, I normally solder them in place. “The parts you will

How to use External Interrupts on an ATmega168

Daniel Garcia from Protostack has made a good tutorial describing the steps to Understand How to use External Interrupts on an ATmega168. It is nice to forget about manually coding to look for changes in state of inputs and other conditions within the microcontroller. Interrupts allow us to keep on doing real work while the system keep monitoring for changes. “Microcontroller interrupts are just like that. The microcontroller is executing

CMU Snakebots Climbs Tree

We normally see snakebots swimming in pools and they can climb inside pipes but check out how well this CMU Snakebots can Climb Trees, it is a creation from the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Via: Botjunkie “From the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, a snake robot (Snakebot) demonstrates how it can climb a tree and look around. Please keep in mind that this robot climbed a specific

How to take good Pictures of Electronic Projects

Funny that Johngineer comes out with his tutorial about How to take Pictures of Electronic Projects now. I just got my photo cube in the mail yesterday. I will be setting it up in a somewhat permanent photography location soon, I can’t wait to use some of these tips to see how I can make my pictures look better. I have been talking with our friend Daniel Garcia from Protostack who