Microcontrollers

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Robotically-Tuned Tube Radio

December 27, 2014 by 8 Comments

Dubbed the “Robot Radio” by [Brek], this clinking-&-clunking project merges three generations of hackers’ favorite technologies: robots, vacuum tubes, and microcontrollers. After the human inputs the desired radio frequency the machine chisels its way through the spectrum, trying its best to stay on target.

This build began its life as a junky old tube radio that [Brek] pulled out of a shed. The case was restored and then the hacking began. Inserted between the human and the radio, a PIC 16F628A keeps watch in both directions. On one side, the radio’s tank circuit is monitored to see what frequency the radio is currently playing. On the other, the human’s input sets a desired frequency. If the two do not match, the PIC tells a stepper motor to begin cranking a pair of gears until they do.

Another interesting feature is that as the tubes and other electronics warm up and change their values, the matching circuit will keep them in line. [Brek] shows this in the video by deliberately sabotaging the gears and seeing the robot adjust them back where they belong.

As an afterthought, the Robot Radio was supplemented with a module that adds 100khz to the signal so that the information from a nearby airport can be received.

[Brek] styled the whole machine up with some copper framing and other bits, similar to his spectacular atomic clock build we featured last month.

See the video of the radio tuning after the break.

Continue reading “Robotically-Tuned Tube Radio” →

Weird Clocks And A Two Chip Apple I

December 26, 2014 by 18 Comments

The Apple I, [Woz]’s original, had about sixty chips on a single board. Most of these chips were logic glue or hilariously ancient DRAMs. The real work was done by the 6502, the 6821 PIA, and the Signetics video chip. It’s a simple computer, really, and following the now popular tradition of two-chip computers, [Dave] built a replica of the Apple I using a 6502 and an ATMega.

The ATMega in this project takes care of everything – the 4k of RAM, the few bytes of ROM, the IO, and even the clock. With the 6502 you can have a little bit of fun with the clock; because the 6502 reads data off the bus a few nanoseconds off the falling edge of the clock and writes on the rising edge, [Dave] played around with the duty cycle of the clock to give the ATMega a bit more time to do its thing. With a 50% duty cycle, the 16Mhz ‘Mega has about eight cycles to decode an address and read or write some data. By making the low part of a clock cycle longer, he has about 45 cycles on the ‘Mega to do all the work. All of this was inspired by a fantastic tutorial on the 6502 clock.

Right now [Dave] has some hex values displaying on a small LCD, while the real I/O is handled by a serial connection to a computer. It’s retro enough, and a future update will include a faux cassette interface, possibly using an SD card for storage.

Student Trolls Anti-Arduino Prof With Parasite MCU

December 25, 2014 by 94 Comments

Like some of our grouchier readers, [PodeCoet]’s Digital Sub-Systems professor loathes everyone strapping an Arduino onto a project when something less powerful and ten times as complicated will do. One student asked if they could just replace the whole breadboarded “up counter” circuit mess with an Arduino, but, since the class is centered around basic logic gates the prof shot him down. Undeterred, our troll smuggled an MCU into a chip and used it to spell out crude messages.

No Arduino? No problem. It took him 4 tries but [PodeCoet] hollowed out the SN74LS47N display driver from the required circuit and made it the puppet of a PIC16F1503 controller. The PIC emulated the driver chip in every way – as ordered it showed the count up and down – except when left unattended for 15 seconds. Then instead of digits the PIC writes out “HELLO”, followed by three things normally covered by swimsuits and lastly a bodily function.

For such a simple hack it is wonderfully and humorously documented. There are annotated progress/failure pictures and video of the hack working.

It is not as elaborate as the microscopic deception in the infamously impossible 3 LED circuit, but it gets to the point sooner.

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8-Bit Chip Rocks 16-Bit 44.1kHz Tunes

December 25, 2014 by 15 Comments

There’s a special place in our hearts for chip tunes generated with your favorite microcontroller. But why stop there? Full-featured audio is a great challenge and it’s not often we see examples of this caliber. It puts out CD-quality audio using not much more than a microcontroller.

How do you get 16-bit audio out of an 8-bit microcontroller. We’ll give you a hint: two pins are used. Not helping? Here it comes: two 8-bit DACs PWM outputs are used on this chip, the ATmega1284. One is used for the lower eight bits, the other handles the upper. The two are combined using carefully calculated precision resistor values and the results are beyond what you imagine. This is produced at a bitrate of 44077.135, slightly off from the 44100Hz standard but we challenge you audiophiles to tell the difference. The wave files are served from an SD card read by the chip using the Petit-FatFs library.

There are so many great things about this project. First off, following [Wancheng Zhou’s] example will let anyone with even basic microcontroller skills build a digital audio player for an [Andrew Jackson] and a couple of [Washingtons]. Secondly, those with a medium uC skill level will want to take the idea and implement/debug it for themselves. Bringing it home, [Wancheng] shows how to gauge the quality of the audio output using FFT.

If you didn’t figure it out by the time of year, this is yet another example of a Cornell ECE 4760 final project. Shout out to [Bruce Land] for inspiring awesome projects and requiring extensive documentation of the projects which itself promotes deeper understand all around.

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Smart CPR Dummy

Smart CPR Dummy Makes Sure You Do It Right

December 22, 2014 by 14 Comments

Have you ever taken a First Aid & CPR training course? Don’t you just love the realism of the dummy mannequins you get to practice on? [Park, Qurashi, & Chen], who are students of Cornell University, thought the dummies could use an intelligent upgrade.

It’s the final project for their electrical and computer engineering course ECE 4760. And what they’ve done is successfully created a budget friendly CPR not-so-dumb dummy using the venerable ATmega1284 microcontroller.

The dummy can sense when chest compressions are given, if the nose is plugged properly when breaths are given, if the head is tilted back properly to open the airway, and it even makes use of a microphone to detect if breaths are given properly! While it does this, it uses LED eyes and an LCD screen to provide training feedback to the student. Once the students are sufficiently practiced, it also has a “real” mode that doesn’t give you any feedback to make sure the students truly learned the technique. Continue reading “Smart CPR Dummy Makes Sure You Do It Right” →

Boxing Trainer

Boxing Trainer Uses DIY Force Sensors

December 21, 2014 by 18 Comments

A team of Cornell students have designed and built their own electronic boxing trainer system. The product of their work is a game similar to Whack-A-Mole. There are five square pads organized roughly into the shape of a human torso and head. Each pad will light up based on a pre-programmed pattern. When the pad lights up, it’s the player’s job to punch it! The game keeps track of the player’s accuracy as well as their reaction time.

The team was trying to keep their budget under $100, which meant that off the shelf components would be too costly. To remedy this, they designed their own force sensors. The sensors are basically a sandwich of a few different materials. In the center is a 10″ by 10″ square of ESD foam. Pressed against it is a 1/2″ thick sheet of insulating foam rubber. This foam rubber sheet has 1/4″ slits cut into it, resulting in something that looks like jail bars. Sandwiching these two pieces of foam is fine aluminum window screen. Copper wire is fixed the screen using conductive glue. Finally, the whole thing is sandwiched between flattened pieces of corrugated cardboard to protect the screen.

The sensors are mounted flat against a wall. When a user punches a sensor, it compresses. This compression causes the resistance between the two pieces of aluminum screen to change. The resistance can be measured to detect a hit. The students found that if the sensor is hit harder, more surface area becomes compressed. This results in a greater change in resistance and can then be measured as a more powerful hit. Unfortunately it would need to be calibrated depending on what is hitting the sensor, since the size of the hitter can throw off calibration.

Each sensor pad is surrounded by a strip of LEDs. The LEDs light up to indicate which pad the user is supposed to hit. Everything is controlled by an ATMEGA 1284p microcontroller. This is the latest in a string of student projects to come out of Cornell. Make sure to watch the demonstration video below. Continue reading “Boxing Trainer Uses DIY Force Sensors” →

Beating The Skins Of Oatmeal Tins

December 21, 2014 by 3 Comments

Ithaca-based power trio [Nick, Roshun, and Ian] share a love of music and beating on things with drum sticks. To that end (and for class credit), they built a Digitally-Recordable, User-Modifiable Sound Emitting Tool (DRUMSET) using force-sensing resistors housed in oatmeal cans.

Anyone who has dealt with FSRs knows how persnickety they can be. In order to direct the force and avoid false positives, these enterprising beat purveyors suspended a sawed-off 2-liter bottle to the underside of each lid. This directs the force coming in from their patent-pending foam-enhanced drum sticks to the small, round sensing area of the FSR. There’s just enough space between the cap and the FSR to account for the play in the oatmeal can lid drum head when struck.

DRUMSET offers different-sounding kits at the push of a momentary switch. At present, there are four pre-programmed kits: the acoustic and electronic foursomes you’d expect, and a kit of miscellaneous sounds like hand claps and wooden claves that sound like something They Might Be Giants would have used on their first album. The fourth is called ‘Smoke on Water’, and is exactly what it sounds like. Should you tire of these, DRUMSET has a program mode with around 20 samples. These can be cycled through on the LCD and assigned to any of the four drums.

The microphone is for record mode, and whatever is recorded can be mapped to any drum. The memory limitations of the ‘1284P make for a 0.2 second sample of whatever is barked into the mic, but that’s plenty of time for shouting ‘hack!’ or firing off whatever hilarious bodily sound one can muster. We think this four track-like functionality of DRUMSET has interesting recording and live performance implications. The team’s future plans include space for longer samples and more robust drum construction (although it is possible to do this without any drums whatsoever). They’d also like to add more drums in case Neil Peart calls. The beat goes on after the break.

Continue reading “Beating The Skins Of Oatmeal Tins” →