Ond?ej Stan?k, a student of Computer science at Charles University in Prague, the Czech Republic, won first prize in the freestyle category on the RobotChallenge competition in Vienna with this matchbox size line following robot (which he has named PocketBox). The robot is powered with two lithium-ion button batteries and is controlled by the Atmel ATmega8 microcontroller.
Bottom view of PocketBot
Arduino needs no introduction; it is an easy-to-use yet powerful open source embedded system development platform that has gained huge amount of popularity in past few years, specially among hobbyists. The standard hardware consists of an 8-bit Atmel AVR processor with on-board headers providing access to its I/O pins. The processor is pre-programmed with a serial bootloader that simplifies the uploading of user programs to the on-chip flash memory without the need of any external programmer. Because of its low cost, user-friendly software development environment (open-source C/C++ like programming platform), rich set of libraries, and tons of resources available online, Arduino has become a common choice for electronics hobbyists these days. Hundreds of plug-in application boards, called Arduino shields, are also commercially available to extend the functional capabilities of the Arduino board. The growing influence of Arduino inspired others to build a number of different versions of it. Amicus18 is also an Arduino-inspired embedded system development platform designed by Les Johnson and introduced by Crownhill Associates; however, it uses a Microchip PIC processor instead of the AVR microcontroller. This article reviews the features of the Amicus platform.
AMICUS18 has the same form factor as the Arduino
TIDeals is offering 50% discount on MSP-EXP430F5529 USB Experimenter’s Board (Normally, it’s $149, and $74.50 after discount), and that includes free international shipping too.
MSP-EXP430F5529 USB Experimenter’s Board
From MSP-EXP430F5529 Experimenter Board User’s Guide,
“The MSP-EXP430F5529 Experimenter Board is a development platform based on the MSP430F5529 with integrated USB. The Experimenter Board showcases the abilities of the latest family of MSP430s and is perfect for learning and developing USB-based applications using the MSP430. The features include a 102×64 dot-matrix LCD, microSD memory card interface, 3-axis accelerometer, five capacitive-touch pads, RF EVM expansion headers, nine LEDs, an analog thumb-wheel, easy access to spare F5529 pins, integrated Spy-Bi-Wire flash emulation module, and standard full JTAG pin access. The kit is pre-programmed with an out-of-box demo to immediately demonstrate the capabilities of the MSP430 and Experimenter Board.”
Although the on-board processor has 128 KB of Flash program memory, the free version of Texas Instruments’ Code Composer Studio (CCS) limits you to compile code up to 16KB only.
Matrix keypads are very common input devices in embedded systems. They have simple architecture and are easy to interface. One good thing about them is that they allow you to interface a large number of input keys to a microcontroller with minimum usage of I/O resources. This tutorial describes two different approaches of reading input data from a 4×4 (16 keys) matrix keypad interfaced to a PIC microcontroller. The pressed key information is displayed on a character LCD. The microcontroller used in this experiment is PIC16F1827.
4x4 matrix keypad interfaced to PICMicro
While LM386 is the most popular audio amplifier IC among hobbyists, it provides the limited output power of only 1 Watt, and for stereo application, two LM386 ICs are required. This project is about making a 5 Watt stereo audio amplifier using the UTC TEA2025 IC chip.
Stereo audio amplifier circuit enclosed inside a plastic box