Tech News | Embedded Lab

Category Archives: Tech News

Raspberry Pi based surveillance system for an injured bird

Posted on July 30, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

Jorge Rancé found a wounded bird on street which he brought home. Until the bird gets recovered completely, he needed a tool to monitor the health progress of the bird from remote when he is not at home. He built this raspberry Pi based surveillance system that not only feeds live video of the injured bird through internet but also tweets automatically every hour to update the surrounding ambient temperature as well as the level of drinking water in a vessel for the bird. Here’s one snapshot of a tweet it made.

Chip-On-Glass (COG) technology for LCD displays

Posted on July 30, 2013 by R-B One comment

LCD displays are commonly supplied as a module with a built-in driver circuitry usually mounted on a PCB at the rear of the module. While this strengthen the module mechanically, it has some drawbacks such as it increases the thickness of the display module and raises the manufacturing cost. NXP semiconductors describes the Chip-On-Glass technology (COG) in this white-paper, whereby the integrated circuit driving the display mounts directly on the display glass, thus reducing the system cost. COG is a very reliable and well established technology, and offers very thin profile LCD display modules at lower cost.

Laser gun shooting game

Posted on July 28, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

Summer is at its peak and if you are looking for an indoor fun project, you might be interested to build this Laser Shooting Game. The project uses two Arduino mini boards; one for a target board and other for a laser gun. The target board has three IR photodiodes placed at the center to receive the laser beam. When the laser hit the target dead center, it is flat on the ground through a servo mechanism for a few seconds and rise up again for another shot. Here’s a video showing the game in action.

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.

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,

« Older Entries Recent Entries »