Tech News | Embedded Lab

Category Archives: Tech News

Full musical keyboard using only discrete logic chips

Posted on November 7, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

Here’s another elegant project submitted to the Open 7400 contest. This project is about constructing an electronic music player with a capability of playing real chords, which means you can press more than one key at a time and each key has got its own frequency generator circuit. The design consists of twelve 4060 oscillator/counter ICs used as tone generators, a dsPIC for sound effect and control, and an LM386 audio amplifiers.

1 MHz frequency counter using discrete CMOS ICs

Posted on November 2, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

Miguel Pedroso constructed a digital frequency counter using CMOS 4000 series logic chips to participate in the Dangerous Prototypes’ 2012 Open 7400 contest. It can measure frequencies up to 999.999 KHz. The project uses six 4029 4-bit counter ICs that are cascaded and configured to work in the BCD decade up counters. The measured frequency is displayed on six 7-segment LEDs, each driven by the 4511 BCD-to-Seven segment driver chip. Via: Dangerous Prototypes

Digital calculator using discrete 7400 series logic ICs

Posted on November 1, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

Two students (Umair Mukati and Naveed Ahmed) from Institute of Industrial Electronics Engineering in Karachi, Pakistan built this 5-bit signed data calculator using the 74 and 40 series logic ICs. This project is also their entry for the ongoing Open 7400 Competition organized by Dangerous Prototypes. The calculator does addition and subtraction functions on 5-bit signed data. The fifth bit is the sign bit. The 7485 comparator IC is used to detect the negative output. The result is displayed on a 3-digit seven segment display.

Norfolk Mini Maker Faire 2012

Posted on October 21, 2012 by R-B One comment

Yesterday (October 20, 2012) was Mini Maker Faire day in Norfolk, Virginia. This was the first Maker Faire happened in the Hampton Roads area. It was really good to see people from local hackerspaces and maker communities and their interesting projects. Here are some pictures that I took at the event.

Stellaris Launchpad and TM1638 based seven segment LED display

Posted on October 14, 2012 by R-B One comment

TM1638 based display modules are found dirt cheap on ebay and dealxtreme. These displays require only 3 I/O pins of a microcontroller to operate. Although they are 5V displays, Dan showed in this tutorial that they can be used with 3.3V platforms such as Stellaris Launchpad. He has published his TM1638 display driver routines for Stellaris Launchpad on Google code.

« Older Entries Recent Entries »