One of my colleagues, Dr. Shane Mayor, has built a very nice LIDAR system for atmospheric research. It’s located at a remote site, at the end of a dirt road, and everything about the system can be controlled remotely except the main pump laser power supply. That supply has a key-switch, which has to be […]
To connect a 12V relay to the Arduino you need the following things: – 1 Arduino – 1 diode for example 1N4007 – 1 NPN transistor for example 2N2222 (in the US) or BC548 (in Europe) – 1 relay for example one with coil voltage 12V and switching voltage 125VAC/10 A – 1 multimeter Step […]
Being a broke amateur photographer isn’t easy. Film, chemicals and paper aren’t cheap and a budget for some studio lights is non existant. So, I decided to, with the help of my trusty arduino, create my own sync controller to use with disposable camera flash circuits. By using a photoresistor the arduino can sense when the flash from your […]
Hey everyone, I wanted to share a project I just finished up. I built a super secret locking box for my girlfriends little brother. He has a knack for creative lego building so I thought it would be a good idea to open him up to the Arduino as soon as possible. The super secret […]
I’m currently helping a couple of engineering students finish a senior project that didn’t get finished last year. Long story… Anyway, it’s a bicycle brake tester being built for Paul Components. The mechanical design is great, but they had trouble with the electronics. Part of those electronics involved writing numbers to a pair of Sparkfun […]
After a bad water damage (our cellar basically filled up whilst we were away for several days), I decided to monitor our water usage for anomalies. Enters Arduino… The idea of this project is to use an arduino to count every drop of water that goes through the water company meter. Said arduino needs to […]
Wrap Beats is an instrument that lets you string together notes in order to create different melodies and visual patterns. I constructed it using the Capacitive sensing library for Arduino and combining that with the music abilities of processing to create a dynamic instrument that can change sounds as you play it. The circular design […]
I got my start in microcontrollers with the Arduino, as many of us outside of electrical engineering did. (And still do!) The ease of programming that little board makes it a great gateway… and like any gateway, sometimes you go through. Most of my projects now don’t use Arduinos directly. For simple microcontroller applications, it’s […]
The RFI-DJ is a USB device for playing MP3 files from your computer. You have a set of RFID cards, each one with a song name written on it. You choose a card and place it on the RFI-DJ, and your computer will play that song. Its magic! Actually, it’s not magic. It uses an […]
My students need to learn LabVIEW —I know, it’s proprietary software, and expensive, but until a viable open-source equivalent comes along we’re stuck with it— and one of the exercises I have them do is to make a program to analyze radioactive decay. This gives them experience in using counters, plotting data in real time, […]
