August | 2014 | Embedded Lab

Monthly Archives: August 2014

Another PIC-based digital thermometer and clock

Posted on August 11, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

This DIY digital clock plus thermometer is designed by Joe Farr and is based on PIC18F25K22 microcontroller. The complete construction details of this project including circuit diagrams, PCB layouts and PIC firmware are posted in his website. He developed his firmware using Proton PIC BASIC compiler, which is available for download for free for this particular PIC microcontroller. He uses DS1302 RTC for timekeeping and DS18B20 for temperature measurement. The temperature and time are displayed on four 2″ seven segment LED displays.

Autonomous fire extinguisher

Posted on August 10, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Trevor Slaton and Dawn Xiang, students from Cornell University, designed this autonomous fire extinguisher that is capable of detecting fires through photo sensors and aiming a water nozzle along two axes to extinguish the fires. Their prototype can detect and extinguish candle fires from about 1 ft. away. Their system uses two servo motors to control the vertical and horizontal position of the water nozzle and a water pump to send out a burst of water from the nozzle. The ATmega1284p microcontroller is used to control the pump as well as the servos.

Google’s Littlebox Challenge offers $1,000,000 prize for designing a smaller inverter

Posted on August 10, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Google and IEEE have jointly announced the Littlebox Challenge, offering One million US dollar prize for designing the most efficient and compact size inverter that would convert direct current from devices such as solar panels and batteries into alternating current for use in homes, businesses, and cars. Inverters are the essential boxes that take direct current from devices such as solar panels and batteries and turn it into alternating current for use in homes, businesses, and cars. The problem is household inverters are too big—roughly the size of a picnic cooler. Making them smaller would enable more solar-powered homes, more

Constant current resistive load controlled by Arduino

Posted on August 9, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Inspired from one of Dave Jones EEVBlog videos on dummy load, Lee has built his own programmable constant current resistive load that allows you to draw a set current from any power supply source. His design is based on Arduino Leonardo and uses the high-power BUK954R8-60E MOSFET to control the amount of current flowing through the load path.

Portable face recognition system using an 8-bit AVR microcontroller

Posted on August 8, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Two Cornell students, Brian Harding and Cat Jubinski, made a standalone face recognition system for access control as their final project for their ECE4760 course. Our goal was to create a portable low-cost system. Their design is based on Atmel ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller and uses a C3088 camera module with an OmniVision OV6620 CMOS image sensor. Face recognition is based on eigenface method.

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