About: Ibrar Ayyub

Pinoco was hit with the holiday rush, so it took a few extra weeks to get my new batch of laser cut acrylic. I nailed it this time. Right away I could tell the engraving was perfect. I even spaced out the holes for the speaker just a hair. The holes on the last one […]

Numitrons are neat display devices similar to nixie tubes but designed for much lower voltages. Numitrons are basically incandescent displays in which filaments create the segments. They have a retro look that I liked so much. I bought 6x IV-9 Russian Numitrons in eBay, they were about 3$ each, they’re pretty cheap! At that time […]

CustomKeys is a customizable, Arduino-based, polyphonic synthesizer. The CustomKeys keyboard uses capacitive touch sensing – each key is made of a conductive material which, when touched, signals the synthesizer to emit a tone from the speaker. The CustomKeys library allows the user to choose an 8-note musical scale for the keys. Furthermore, users have a […]

A few weeks ago, it came to my attention that IKEA do a set of colour-changeable LED strips. I’ve been looking for a decent way of providing some lighting behind my computer to reduce eye-strain for a long time, and these seemed perfect: I was very pleased with them, but no self-respecting nerd would stop […]

Swiss scientists have created the first semiconductor laser consisting solely of elements of main group IV (the carbon group) on the periodic table. Simply, this means that the new device is directly compatible with other elements in that group – such as silicon, carbon, and lead – and so can be directly incorporated in a […]

The world’s first 100MS/s open source oscilloscope for iPad, Android and PC. A must-have for every Arduino and Raspberry Pi developer! SmartScope The SmartScope combines 3 high-end instruments into 1 mobile, smart device. Accessible previously only to high-tech labs, the SmartScope allows everyone to own a personal lab! Starring a dual-channel 100MS/s oscilloscope, the SmartScope […]

So this time around, it’s another fun and functional microcontroller based DIY, a g-force measurement system with data logging to SD card. HARDWARE USED: 1) Arduino UNO w/ATmega328P 2) 3-axis accelerometer breakout 3) SD card 4) SD card breakout w/level shifting circuit 5) LED HOW IT WORKS: Basically, the system uses an accelerometer to measure […]

Introduction Ghosty is an autonomous little robot who is adventurous and loves to explore his surroundings. However, unlike a normal ghost, he doesn’t like to scare people. Instead they actually scare him! In our most current version of Ghosty, his vision line is based on the data of two proximity sensor data reads. The difference […]

In embedded systems, oftentimes it is needed to generate analog outputs from a microcontroller. Examples of such include, generating audio tones, voice, music, smooth continuous waveforms, function generators, voltage reference generators, etc. Traditionally in such cases the most common techniques applied are based on Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), resistor networks and external Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) […]

I love the movie Stargate and when I first saw it I immediately knew I wanted to make one of the super cool Horus guard helmets. I had sketched multiple designs over the years and figured out several different methods for building it but rejected them all for one reason or another- usually due to […]