Tips and Tricks | Embedded Lab

Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

Active IR gesture sensing

Posted on December 10, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

From Silicon Labs’ application note on IR Gesture Sensing: Touchless user interfaces are an emerging trend in embedded electronics as product designers seek out innovative control methods and more intuitive ways for users to interact with electronics. Active infrared proximity motion sensing can solve this challenge. Silicon Labs Si114x proximity and ambient light sensor products are ideally suited to touchless gesturing applications such as page turning on an e-reader, scrolling on a tablet PC, or GUI navigation. The Si114x features up to three LED drivers and has the ability to sense gestures within a 7 to 15 cm product interaction region, assuming a hand as

Motion Sensing Pumpkin Vibrobot

Posted on November 10, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Mechanical Engineer and K-12 STEM educator, Ben Finio, has designed this kid-friendly motion sensing pumpkin Bot, which could be a fun project to make for the next Halloween. The thing I liked the most about this PumpkinBot is its simplicity and microcontroller-free design. His motion-sensing bot uses a passive infrared (PIR) sensor attached in front of the pumpkin to detect motion. Three toothbrush heads are glued underneath the PumpkinBot to give it a stable tripod. When a motion is sensed, it triggers the robot’s LED eyes and a DC motor attached on its back. A wine cork fixed to the

Access 15 tact switches with one input pin

Posted on October 29, 2014 by R-B One comment

A while back I posted two articles on reading multiple tact switches using a minimal number of I/O pins of PIC microcontroller. One of them uses a resistor-divider network to create an unique range of analog voltages for each keypress. The voltage is then measured through an ADC input channel to detect which key has been pressed. Another approach was a 2-wire keypad interface using 555 timer IC configured as an astable multivibrator. The 555 timer is configured to generate a specific frequency of oscillation for each key press. However, these are not the only methods out there. Benabadji Noureddine’s recent

Underwear alarm

Posted on October 28, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Last week we looked at Randy’s walking robot made of customized 3-D printed parts. This week, he came up with this crazy idea of making underwear wake-up alarm for his lazy girl friend, who does not wake up with alarm clocks. His new project, Goodmorning Underwear, is built using the littleBits prototyping platform and a pair of panties, which vibrates to wake you up in the morning. The event to trigger the alarm are set up through Google Calender. Two vibration motors embedded into the underwear set off a gentle buzz to remind you of the event.

Digital Stethoscope example using the TMS320C5515 DSP board

Posted on October 23, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Texas Instrument’s medical development kit (MDK) is based on the C5515 DSP and consists of individual analog front-end boards forvECG, digital stethoscope, and pulse oximeter. This application note describes the implementation of digital stethoscope using the front-end board of MDK and sensor to capture the acoustic sound waves of the heart and lungs. The board contains the necessary circuitry for signal conditioning and acquiring signals from the sensors.

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