A while back we wrote an article on sensing orientation with the adxl335 accelerometer. In that article I mentioned all the drawbacks of trying to do this with just an accelerometer, and said that if you needed something stable, what you really needed was an IMU. Well… We are back with an article covering just that, the Digital IMU 6DOF (6 degrees of freedom) breakout board from sparkfun. An IMU (Inertial M ...

Hey Everyone Today I hope to teach you all about ultrasonic sensors and hopefully by the end you'll have a nice little digital tape measure of your own to use as you please. Enjoy This is my second version of this project so if you can get it as small or just don't feel like dealing with the Arduino Pro mini feel free to change it in any way you want. To start off we will need: An Arduino (Im using the Pro ...

This post describes Mesa-Video, a low cost, low power, small size and fully Open Source Hardware and Software solution for providing 800×600 digital video for Arduino ( and other ) microcontrollers.  Mesa-Video makes it quick and easy to display text and 24bit color graphics from any MCU using a single UART serial port pin. Applications for Mesa-Video are embedded projects requiring video output and embedde ...

I'm astounded that some cars don't have a digital compass always visible. You either have to launch the navigation app each time which may even disappear when you adjust the radio. In this project, you'll create a digital compass that can be powered by by the cigarette lighter or another source (batteries make it handheld). You could buy one, but where's the fun in that? You'll use an awesome OLED screen (w ...

I recently found six 2.3″ red 7 segment displays in my collection which I purchased from Rapid Electronics when they were clearing out non-RoHS stock. Since I have no clock at my work bench I decided to construct one from some prototyping pad board, a Microchip PIC18F26K20 microcontroller and a Dallas DS32KHZ temperature compensated 32.768kHz crystal. The displays I used are SA23-12SRWA, which don’t appear ...

One fine day while i was rummaging through the part bin, I found an old project that probably was never completed ! FM Radio ! I tried to make one when i was in 7th grade, waiting at the counter of a dingy electronics repair shop for anyone to pay attention to the parts list gathered over the internet ( Dial up days ! ). At that time, i just jotted down all i could from the internet and went straight to the ...

Today I’m going to present some of more advanced capabilities of ADC built in ATSAM3X8E – the heart of Arduino Due. I like the Arduino platform. It makes using complex microcontrollers much simpler and faster. Lets take for example the analog-to-digital converter. To configure it even on Atmega328 (Arduino Uno/Duemilanove) you must understand and set correct values in 4 registers. And it can be much more in ...

For the first time in history, a prototype radio has been created that is claimed to be completely digital, generating high-frequency radio waves purely through the use of integrated circuits and a set of patented algorithms without using conventional analog radio circuits in any way whatsoever. This breakthrough technology promises to vastly improve the wireless communications capabilities of everything fr ...

Digital thermometer using arduino and LM35. This article is about a simple three digit digital thermometer using arduino. Range of this thermometer is from 0°C to 99.9°C. There is also a provision for displaying the temperature in °F scale. Three terminal analog temperature sensor LM35 is used as the sensor here. LM35 can measure temperatures between -55°C to +155°C. The supply voltage range is from 4V to 3 ...

Have you ever been curious about the power consumption of an appliance? For example did you wonder how much it will cost you to leave your television in standby mode whole night? Or did you want to learn how much change your refrigerator settings will make on your electric bill? If your answer is yes, you can use a wattmeter to measure the power consumption of a device. In this project we are building one. ...

Here you will find complete construction details including circuit diagrams, PCB layouts and PIC firmware (and the source code). The code was written in Proton PIC BASIC but the good news is that there is now a free version of this compiler available for download; AMICUS18. ** UPDATED 30th June 2016 ** There is an update to this project available that replaces the inferior DS1302 RTC with a much more accura ...

A digital to analogue converter takes a series of digital inputs (a string of 1s and 0s, in our case there will be 8 of them like 10011001) and converts it into an analogue output. You see DACs in every digital audio device (MP3 players, CD players) as these all store music in digital form, but need to drive a speaker with an analogue signal. Hence the need to convert the digital data into an analogue signa ...