August | 2012 | Embedded Lab

Monthly Archives: August 2012

Breakout board for DE0-Nano FPGA development board

Posted on August 9, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

DE0-Nano is a great FPGA development and education board featuring the Altera Cyclone® IV 4C22 FPGA with 22,320 Logic elements (LEs), 594 Embedded memory (Kbits), 66 Embedded 18 x 18 multipliers, 4 General-purpose PLLs, and 153 Maximum FPGA I/O pins. Since not all of these I/O pins are used very often, Chris from PyroElectro has made his own expansion board for easy prototyping with DE0-Nano. He designed a PCB for his breakout board that basically connects to the 2×20 pin headers on the DE0-Nano through an IDE cable and makes those I/O pins easily available for prototyping on breadboard.

Building wireless sensor applications using Dorji’s DRF5150S and DRF4432S RF modules (Part 1)

Posted on August 4, 2012 by R-B 10 comments

Dorji Applied Technology is a China-based company that primarily focuses on building different types of RF modules that can be easily incorporated in designing wireless data loggers, sensor network, telemetry and other wireless applications. Their products mostly use RF transceiver chips from ADI, Infineon, and Silicon Labs. Some of their RF modules have an additional preprogrammed microcontroller that allows direct interface of selected analog and digital sensors to the module. This means you don’t need any external MCU or to write codes for these sensors. I have been playing with their DRF5150S and DRF4432S RF modules for past couple weeks

Intelligent temperature monitoring and control system using AVR microcontroller

Posted on August 2, 2012 by R-B 13 comments

Controlling temperature has been a prime objective in various applications including refrigerators, air conditioners, air coolers, heaters, industrial temperature conditioning and so on. Temperature controllers vary in their complexities and algorithms. Some of these use simple control techniques like simple on-off control while others use complex Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) or fuzzy logic algorithms. In this project I’m going to discuss about a simple control algorithm and utilize it intelligently unlike analogue controllers. Here are the features of our controller: Audio-visual setup for setting temperature limits. Fault detection and evasive action. Temperature monitoring and display. Audio-visual warning. System status. Settable