It used to be that upgrading a car stereo was fairly simple. There were only a few mechanical sizes and you could find kits to connect power, antennas, and speakers. Now, though, the car stereo has interfaces to steering wheel controls, speed sensors, rear-view cameras, and more. [RND_ASH] was tired of his 14-year-old system so he took an Android head unit, a tablet, and an Arduino, and made everything work ...

A collection of mini-spectrometer chips are arrayed on a tray after being made through conventional chip-making processes. Image: Felice Frankel Tiny device could replace expensive lab-scale equipment for many applications. Spectrometers — devices that distinguish different wavelengths of light and are used to determine the chemical composition of everything from laboratory materials to distant stars — are ...

Electronic, Arduino enthusiasts and makers looking for a project to keep them busy this weekend, may be interested in a cool custom switch created by Dave Darko. That requires users to intermittently push a button in order to produce additional ‘on’ time and has been aptly named the, “Unhackable Arduino Switch Matrix.” The ‘unhackable’ switch, which resembles a MIDI sequencer input, runs on an Arduino Nano ...

As the popularity of Arduino boards increased, the demand for boards which comes embedded with some of the add-ons used with the Arduino increased. One of the most popular add-ons were the WiFi modules which are used to connect Arduino boards to the internet. Several boards were released by different manufacturers which used the Arduino form factor and had onboard WiFi module, but none of these boards ...

Whilst swapping out the stereo in his car for a more modern Android based solution, [Aaron] noticed that it only utilised a single CAN differential pair to communicate with the car as opposed to a whole bundle of wires employing analogue signalling. This is no surprise, as modern cars invariably use the CAN bus to establish communication between various peripherals and sensors. In a series of videos, [Aaron ...

The first open source iCE40 FPGA development board designed for teachers and students. It’s comming soon on CrowdSupply. Are you ready to venture into the brave new world of digital logic design? The iCEBreaker FPGA board is specifically designed for you. It’s designed to work out of the box with the newest open source FPGA development tools and next generation open CPU architectures. The iCEBreaker FP ...

LAN interface with 4 relays, 8 programmable  I/Os and 4 analog inputs, IoT-ready. How many times have you read or heard about the Internet of things (Iot)? The Internet of things is an expression that is becoming more and more popular lately; it represents the expansion of the Internet into the world of objects and physical locations. Thanks to this technology, many objects that used to be exclusively ...

The FT232 USB-to-serial converter is one of the most commonly-used methods of adding USB functionality to small projects, but recently I found that these chips are capable of sending more than just serial signals. With some creative programming, individual output pins can be big-banged to emulate a clock, data, and chip select line to control SPI devices. This post shares some of the techniques I use to bit ...

Windows applications are very common for our everyday work and life, so why should we leave them home (or office) on our Windows desktop PCs? What if we could use them on the go, right on our smartphones or tablets? Well, with the modern IT development level this is not the question anymore. ExaGear Windows Emulator app can solve this issue. This is a virtual machine that allows you to natively run any PC a ...

Building an Internet of Things based system has always been an exciting art that usually comes with one major challenge to overcome – Connectivity. A smart system or an even intelligent system that collects data without having any network capability can’t be called an IoT system and it’s that device connectivity that gives it the IoT factor. Cellular connectivity has been one of the go-to connectivity for I ...

The dream of every maker and innovator out there is to make a product that will be usable by potential users. For hardware-based products and devices, the first step in achieving this is to develop a prototype and then move from there. The prototype will involve making a circuit diagram on a breadboard and then commence to make a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) for the circuit under construction. After checking ...

As a consequence of the social distancing and self isolation, many a maker has been searching for ways to cure boredom. So what happens when you put a maker in a closed space with electronics parts. The answer is a bunch of random microcontroller projects that help beat boredom. [Danac1886] posts a video with a bunch of experiments with the ATtiny series of microcontrollers which can be a source of time-kil ...