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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This tutorial will show you how to make a thermal cycler from scratch for about $85. In short, PCR (polymerase chain reaction) amplifies bits of DNA, creating millions of copies of a target sequence. You can use it to test a DNA sample for a specific gene, for instance, to check for genetic modification in […]
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 […]
One Challenge with working with RGB LEDs is getting the right Red, Green and Blue values to match a color you are trying to display. You can start with web colors, and then sometimes need to adjust them since the LEDs don’t look quite the same as they do on monitors. So, this is a […]
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, […]
Hi! In this tutorial you will learn to make a mood lamp with Arduino. I know that you may have seen a lot of mood lamp projects with Arduino, but I wasn’t very satisfied with them because they all change the color very abruptly. So, I decided to make a smooth mood lamp and I […]
