Archive by Author
Some Cool Electronics Stuff from Your Discarded DVD Player
July 20, 2009 by rwb, under Yet Another Tips.
Today you could easily find a decent quality DVD player for under USD 50; therefore many people just throw it away when it’s broken and just buy a new one instead of repairing it. But as the microcontroller and electronics hobbyist you would be amazed of how these junks could be become your home’s lab valuable asset and these electronics stuff perhaps worth almost USD 50 if you buy it one by one. (more…)
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Build Your Own Transistor Based Mobile Line Follower Robot (LFR) – First Part
July 11, 2009 by rwb, under Robotics.
The mobile line follower robot is a type of mobile robot with only has one specific task which is to follow the line made with black tape over the white background or vise verse. The LFR perhaps is one of the most popular robot build by the roboticists. What makes this LFR is so popular, I think because of its simplicity and yet it could be used as the teaching tools of how we could implement the industrial standard control system such as the PID (Proportional Integral Deferential) control system on this robot. Another factor probably is the increase of the LFR annual tournament conducted in many countries. (more…)
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Simple and Easy Light Emitting Diode (LED) Tester
July 7, 2009 by rwb, under Yet Another Tips.
LED is used in many microcontrollers based project mostly as the indicator; by applying the right forward bias voltage to this special diode, it will emit the light. Today the used of LED has been tremendously increased not just as the electronic devices indicator but also for replacing the conventional light bulb (e.g. flash light, traffic light, car’s break/sign lamp, etc) and perhaps soon it will replace the fluorescent tube lamp in our house. (more…)
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Using Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) Master and Slave with Atmel AVR Microcontroller
June 25, 2009 by rwb, under Microcontroller.
Sometimes we need to extend or add more I/O ports to our microcontroller based project. Because usually we only have a limited I/O port left than the logical choice is to use the serial data transfer method; which usually only requires from one up to four ports for doing the data transfer. Currently there are few types of modern embedded system serial data transfer interface widely supported by most of the chip’s manufactures such as I2C (read as I square C), SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface), 1-Wire (One Wire), Controller Area Network (CAN), USB (Universal Serial Bus) and the RS-232 families (RS-423, RS-422 and RS-485). The last three interface types is used for long connection between the microcontroller and the devices, up to 1200 meters for the RS-485 specification, while the first three is used for short range connection. (more…)
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Single In Line (SIL) LED Display for your Microcontroller Based Project
June 18, 2009 by rwb, under Yet Another Tips.
If you use a breadboard for quite a lot to develop and prototype your microcontroller’s based project than you will realize that we repeatedly use the LED to display the microcontroller’s port status. With more LED and its current limiter resistor being added to the breadboard, soon it will occupied our breadboard space very quickly, especially if we use small breadboard for prototyping; not to mention the wire we have to make for this LED and its resistor. (more…)
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Behavior Based Artificial Intelligent Mobile Robot with Sharp GP2D120 Distance Measuring Sensor – BRAM Part 2
June 8, 2009 by rwb, under Robotics.
What is the intelligent anyway; could we categories how the bees building their tiny hexagonal compound nest, ants searching for their food or birds migration using precision navigation over continental are the intelligent acts; or we as the human being with our cultures and civilizations is the only one that can be categories as the intelligent being? These kinds of question probably will not have satisfied answer as the answer is more philosophy terms rather than physics or mathematics law; therefore I think anyone could give their own opinion to this question. (more…)
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Building BRAM your first Autonomous Mobile Robot using Microchip PIC Microcontroller – Part 1
May 25, 2009 by rwb, under Robotics.
Have you ever thought that most of our perception about the robot is based on the Hollywood movie! The famous 3CPO and R2D2 from Star Wars until the little cute garbage compacting robot named WALL-E; all of these machines are example of our dreams or should I say our quest to what we all think about the robot should be. Although the robot that we are going to build here is still far away from the technologies shown on those movies but at least it will give you an introductory to the robotics world. (more…)
