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Monthly Archives: July 2013

MikroElektronika’s new Thunder Click board

Posted on July 26, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

MikroElektronika introduces Thunder Click board which has AS3935 lightning sensor as well as MA5532 coil antenna. It is capable of detecting potentially hazardous lightning activity in the vicinity and provides estimated distance to the center of the storm. Thunder click communicates with a host microcontroller via SPI lines, and is designed to work with both 3.3V or 5V power supply. Key features Lightning Detector warns of lightning storm activity within a 40 km radius. Distance to the head of the storm down to 1 km. Detects both cloud-to-ground and intra-cloud (cloud-to-cloud) flashes. SPI communication interface.

SPI7SEGDISP4.40-1R LED displays are back in stock

Posted on July 26, 2013 by R-B One comment

SPI7SEGDISP4.40-1R is a serial 4-digit seven segment LED display based on MAXIM’s MAX7219 device. This display module can be interfaced with any microcontroller that has 3 I/O pins available. If the microcontroller features a built-in hardware SPI, then the display module can be interfaced as a SPI slave device. In that case the SPI signal lines SDO (serial data out), SCLK (serial clock), and SS (slave select) from the microcontroller can be directly connected to the DIN, CLK, and LOAD pins labeled on the display module. CS is active low signal. In case the host microcontroller doesn’t have a hardware

Making a digital color sensor using RGB LED and photo-cell

Posted on July 25, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

Electronic color sensors find applications in many automated processes such as sorting objects by color, detecting presence of a color coating, etc to improve quality at production line speeds. The fundamental principle of color detection is very simple. You can use an RGB LED and a basic light dependent resistor (LDR) to construct a simple color sensor. The idea is to illuminate a sample material with three primary colors (red, green, and blue), one at a time, and measure the reflected amount of light using the LDR. Each material reflects different combination of red, green, and blue light. For example,

Application of ambient light sensors (ALS) in portable electronics

Posted on July 23, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

ROHM Semiconductors presents this white paper on the Applications of Ambient Light sensors in Portable Electronics. In portable electronic products, reducing the power consumption to provide the user with increased battery life is one of today’s critical design considerations. The liquid crystal display (LCD) and its associated backlighting are among the more (and frequently the most) power hungry loads in portable products. As a result, the use of an ambient light sensor (ALS) to optimize the operation of the backlight LEDs under a variety of environmental lighting situations is increasing while, at the same time, the preferred technology choices available

Universal TV sleep timer project

Posted on July 23, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

This TV-Go-Sleep timer turns off any TV after a preset delay time. This project is built around an Arduino microcontroller that uses an open source TV-B-Gone library. The hardware part consists of a pushbutton switch to set the delay time, which is shown on a 7-segment display. When the timer expires, the Arduino transmits “Turn OFF” codes for all known TVs through IR LED, and the TV shuts down.

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