I’ve been working on a new project recently. Actually, “recently” isn’t necessarily the best word. I’ve been poking at it for months, but only really putting in an hour or two a week here and there, so it’s been coming along very slowly. At any rate, the project idea is very simple: I’m just making […]
Cadsoft’s Eagle schematic capture and PCB layout software has become very popular among hobbyists, most likely due to its reasonable (non-existent, for the lite version) price tag. However, at times it is not the most straightforward piece of software to use and learn. While I’m afraid I’m not going to write a tutorial that explains […]
This was a project that Jim Spoth and I made for our digital systems design course. The end product is a configurable Conway’s Game of Life implementation on an Altera DE2 FPGA board using a 64 x 32 bicolor LED matrix for the display. A PS/2 keyboard is used to create/modify/clear the current state of […]
This was actually a really fun project that Jon and I did for our Interfacing Digital Electronics course. The objective was to use an Optek OPB745 reflective object sensor and a Freescale HCS12 microcontroller to read Morse code from printed paper. The project was very open-ended, and it was up to each team to decide […]
Meter Maven is the name given to our project for our senior projects course. This project actually has its own website, so I won’t bother going into too much detail here. You should definitely check out the website, though, as it’s filled with all sorts of technical information and additional media. Overview The Meter […]
This project is my personal rendition of the popular persistence of vision (POV) hard drive clock design. I had seen a few of these online before, and decided that it would be a fun project to try to build one myself. If you haven’t encountered one of these before, the basic idea is that you […]
This is a really fun project that I made as an apartment decoration in college. An LED matrix display is used to display a realtime visualization of the frequency spectrum of an incoming audio signal. Left and right channel data are displayed on the appropriate half of the display, with low frequencies being represented at […]
This project was just a fun little thing to try to combine my interests in music with my interests in electronics. The project uses a 40×2 character LCD, some pushbuttons, and a MIDI connector to create a four track step sequencer to generate drum beats on a MIDI instrument. The sequences are a fixed 32 […]
Ever since I had started my collegiate education, I had been interested in USB. It struck me as something that should be more accessible, as the antiquated serial and parallel ports have quickly gone the way of the dodo. USB offers a myriad of desirable features, including high communication speeds, plug-and-play capabilities, and a compact […]
This project is probably my first “real” project involving microcontrollers (I had not worked with microcontrollers prior to college). By “real”, all that I actually mean is that I took the time to solder it. Previously, my only microcontroller experience was breadboarding some blinking lights and or playing around with individual peripherals (UART, timer, etc.) […]