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
 If you need to control some motors wirelessly this Wireless Motor Controller project by PyroElectro might be just the thing to get you kickstarted. The project uses SN754410NE chip to drive the motor and a XBee module to make the project wireless. “The purpose of this project is to build a system that can independently and wirelessly control two DC motors. To do this, the system will need
The video above demonstrates what Vijay Kumar and his team are building. We have seen some toy quadcopters that have some impressive capabilities but I can’t wait till a tiny and smart quadcopter as agile as these are available. If you don’t have the time to watch the entire video make sure you see the flight demonstrations at 10:05. Thanks for sending this in Matt. Â “In his lab at
PyroElectro highlights this attention-grabbing PIC 18F4450 based Line Following Robot project by some university students. The main purpose of this embedded system is to follow a line. You can also refer with the description below if you want to pick the idea for your academic projects. Via: PyroElectro “This was a second-year Embedded Systems Application Project at university. We were given the hardware and after assembling the robot, had to
Windell H. Oskay from EMSL created a detailed discussion on using Zener Diodes. He has designed a circuit flow using Zener diodes to control the reverse breakdown while designing up a circuit which is impossible to do if he would had used a regular diode. “Zener diodes are a special type of semiconductor diode– devices that allow current to flow in one direction only –that also allow current to flow
 If you have a junk box full of all sorts of motors from printers, scanners and other discarded tech you need to know what you have so you can use it in your next project. Thanks to Steaky for sending in this info that was written to help you determine what type of stepper motor you have and how to use it. “Not only do stepper motors come
There are lots of surface mount parts out there that aren’t available in DIP format. Normal DIP format chips and various other parts have pins that are configured with a 0.1 inch spacing. Breadboards make prototyping a circuit fast and easy since there is no soldering involved, it is literally plug and play. If the connections need to be changed all you do is pull the wiring out and
