RC Car Telemetry

telemetry

Meghan Desai and Yiling Li built this radio controlled car telemetry system for their “Designing with microcontrollers” class. They had looked at several other RC projects and decided it would save a lot of trouble if they didn’t attempt to work with the car’s on-board microcontroller. They built separate boards to house the four IR sensing pairs, temperature sensors, accelerometer, and an Atmel Mega32. All of the collected data is transmitted at 433MHz. On the receiving end is another Mega32 that processes the data and formats it for display on a TV. They’ve done an excellent job documenting their project.

If you have to do a design project this semester, we’d love to see it. Just get some free hosting from Blogger and post your project. I’m using Blogger as an example since they don’t crash and burn when we link to them.

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Underwater Living

divester

Willy Volk interviewed Lloyd Godson for Divester’s latest podcast. Lloyd is building a self-sustaining underwater habitat: the BioSUB. It will hold at least 15 square meters of engineered wheat to convert CO2 to oxygen. He also plans on testing Alon Bodner’s Like-A-Fish tankless SCUBA technology. The system works by lowering the pressure of the seawater to extract the oxygen. The BioSUB project is sponsered by the Australian Geographic Society and Lloyd plans on launching this August.

A quick note: if you caught my friend’s dance/electronica radio show last week, it’s on again tonight 7-9PM CST. Click for the live stream.

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