Miniature PC packs a big punch

raspberry_pi

We are always looking out for smaller yet capable computers for our projects, and this newest offering by [David Braben] is looking mighty nice. [David] is the head of a UK-based games studio, but has recently been focusing on bringing small, affordable PCs to classrooms around the world.

The computer, called Raspberry Pi,  is about the size of your … Read the rest

Advanced robotic arm control using Kinect

kinect_teleoperation

[Ryan Lloyd], [Sandeep Dhull], and [Ruben D'Sa] wrote in to share a robotics project they have been keeping busy with lately. The three University of Minnesota students are using a Kinect sensor to remotely control a robotic arm, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Using OpenNI alongside PrimeSense, the team started out by doing some simple skeleton … Read the rest

Improve charlieplexing performance with interrupts

single_chip_led_matrix

[Dmitry] was shopping for LEDs and accidentally pulled the trigger on the wrong type. Since he didn’t want to be wasteful, he figured he should at least take the time to build something with them.

A LED matrix display was the obvious project choice, but he only had a PIC16F688 at his disposal. Since the micro controller only has 11 … Read the rest

USB Minecraft portal

[Sprite_tm] had heard some time ago that middle of the road Nokia phones had some really interesting LCDs, they are 2.4 inch TFT’s with 320×240 resolution. He immediately got 3 beccause they are pretty low cost as well, and started working with them. Apparently these LCDs are self contained, meaning they have all the driver chips and memory on board, … Read the rest

Digital Audio on the Parallax Propeller

[Beth] had the idea for transmitting digital audio over S/PDIF on a Propeller a few years ago, but only just got around to a writeup. For that, we thank her.

The writeup has a marvelous walkthrough of the S/PDIF protocol and the problems associated with with generating the signal. S/PDIF is a relatively resource-intensive protocol – the signal is … Read the rest