Tips and Tricks | Embedded Lab

Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

Proper PCB grounding for mixed-signal designs

Posted on July 31, 2013 by R-B 2 comments

Circuit board designers have always concerns about the proper way to handle grounding for integrated circuits (ICs), which have separate analog and digital grounds. This tutorial from MAXIM integrated discusses proper printed-circuit board (PCB) grounding for mixed-signal designs. For most applications a simple method without cuts in the ground plane allows for successful PCB layouts with this kind of IC. Next, we learn how to place components and route signal traces to minimize problems with crosstalk. Finally we move on to consider power supply-currents and end by discussing how to extend what we have learned to circuits with multiple mixed-signal

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.

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,

Driving multiple LCD displays through an I2C interface

Posted on March 19, 2013 by R-B One comment

Jesus Echavarria tipped us off about his latest project of controlling multiple HD44780 LCD displays through an I2C interface. He used Microchip’s MCP23017 I/O port expanders and successfully drove eight LCDs with only two microcontroller pins. The MCP23017 device provides 16-bit, general purpose parallel I/O expansion for I2C bus. Upto 8 such devices can be connected on to the same I2C bus by varying their slave addresses through the hardware address pins. In his project, Jesus used eight MCP23017 devices (one for each LCD) to control eight LCDs over an I2C bus.

Soldering instructions for the TrH Meter kit

Posted on January 3, 2013 by R-B 7 comments

First of all I would like to thank all of those who preordered the TrH Meter kits during the fundraising campaign that we ran on Tindie. It’s because of your support that we successfully launched this project. Please follow the soldering instructions provided below while building the TrH Meter.

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