Tracking a car like it were a computer mouse

March 10, 2013 By 33 Comments

optical-mouse-sensor-tracks-vehicle-motion

This is [Paul Mandel's] Ground-truth velocity sensor. That’s a fancy name for a device which tracks the movement of a vehicle by actually monitoring the ground its travelling over. This differs from simply measuring wheel rotation (which is how traditional odometers work) in that those systems are an indirect measurement of motion. For us the interesting part is the … Read the rest

Filed Under: parts, transportation hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,

Lightsaber color selector

October 24, 2010 By 11 Comments

[George Hadley] developed a nice setup to control the color of a replica Lightsaber. A small PCB houses a PIC 18F2221 and three switching transistors for the colors. A powerful LED resides in the tip of the handle, lighting up the diffuser that makes up the blade. But our favorite part is the control scheme. He’s embedded a small … Read the rest

Filed Under: led hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,