While most people would simply throw away an out-of-warranty iPod with a broken play/pause button, Craig gave his a new lease on life by attaching a custom-hacked dock connector. Inside the connector, he stuffed an ATtiny 13 microcontroller with a few other passive components. Now when he pushes the button on the connector, the ATtiny […]
Here’s a well-documented and rather enlightening project from Embedded Lab: This project demonstrates a technique to measure the heart rate by sensing the change in blood volume in a finger artery while the heart is pumping the blood. It consists of an infrared LED that transmits an IR signal through the fingertip of the subject, […]
Instructable user Esterill shows how to make your own swanky under-cabinet LED lighting scheme on a budget and the results are quite professional looking. For extra measure, Esterill used a microcontroller to fade the LEDs up when they’re turned on and added a “half bright” mode for times when dimmer light is desired. Nice touch!
You can leave your keys at home with this clever hack by Billy Chasen, who rigged up his deadbolt to a Propeller-based Spinneret Web Server. Using an SMS gateway called Twilio, he can open and close the lock by tapping out a quick text message. Not only that, but the system also responds to acknowledge […]
If you haven’t already heard, we’re excited to be running the Make It Last, a project build series and contest, sponsored by Microchip and Energizer. Throughout the course of this series, we’re going to cover three project builds, each demonstrating an example of low-power design using microcontrollers. Just getting started? We suggest you take a […]
Luis Cruz of Honduras built this Embedded Entertainment System using a total of four microcontrollers.
Two reflective sensors are included in the kit (useful for line following and edge detection projects), and you can order additional components both from TinyCLR.com and other robotics sites. Many construction parts are included in the kit so it is very easy to attach additional sensors or other parts. As you can see on the picture above, I already added a Sharp IR distance sensor in front (so I can teach the robot to not bump on walls). I also added an Xbee expansion board on the back so one day I can control the robot remotely (and my Holy Grail is to connect the robot to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio).
