Fresh hacks every day
[Alan] has been working on driving this WS2811 LED module with an AVR microcontroller. It may look like a standard six-pin RGB LED but it actually contains both an LED module and a microcontroller to drive it. This makes it a very intriguing part. It's not entirely simple to send commands to the module as the timing must be very precise. But once the communication has happened, the LED will … [Read more...]
[Jack Crossfire] took one of those inexpensive indoor helicopters and made it autonomous. He didn't replace the hardware used for the helicopter, but augmented it and patched into the remote control to make a base station. The position feedback is provided in much the same way that the Wii remote is used as a pointing device. On the gaming console there is a bar that goes under the TV with two … [Read more...]
Have you ever seen hard drive platters this big before? Of course you haven't, the cost of this unit is way beyond your pay grade. But now that it's decades old we get a chance to post around inside this beast. [Dave Jones] -- who we haven't seen around these parts in far too long -- takes a look inside this $250,000 storage device. In this episode of the EEVblog [Dave] is tearing down a late … [Read more...]
This is a Geiger counter which charts its readings on a webpage. [Radu Motisan] put a lot of time into the build and it shows. This thing is packed with features and the hardware choices were the best combinations found through several iterations of development. In addition to radiation levels the sensor unit takes several other measurements. These include temperature, humidity, luminosity, and … [Read more...]
We've tried building our own ARM cross compiler on a Linux box and it's no picnic. Luckily there is a free cross compiling toolchain available through Mentor Graphics (formerly called Code Sourcery G++). But those looking to develop on a Mac aren't so lucky. There is help via a script, and [Michael] wrote a guide detailing how to use crosstool-ng to build an ARM toolchain on Mountain … [Read more...]
This is one of those ideas that's so simple we can't believe we haven't heard of it before now. [Johan von Konow] is upping his holiday decorating game this year by designing his Gingerbread House in CAD and cutting it out on a laser cutter. If designed well this will easily allow you to increase the complexity of your design by orders of magnitude. We remember making Gingerbread Houses with … [Read more...]
[Andrzej Surowiec] liked the functionality of the mass storage bootloader available on some NXP LPC development boards. His latest project was to write a mass storage bootloader for the Stellaris Launchpad. It allows you to flash your compiled firmware to the chip simply by mounting the board as a USB storage device and copying over the binary file. The chip has plenty of flash memory (the … [Read more...]
Subscribe for weekly videos
Recent comments