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Tutorial on Advanced Arduino Sound Synthesis

Posted on November 14, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

The easiest way of producing a sound using an Arduino board is by bit-banging its I/O pin driving a buzzer or speaker. However, if you want to go beyond simple beeps and synthesis complex and more interesting sounds, you need a better understanding of the Arduino hardware as well as the theory behind wave synthesis. Here’s a wonderful tutorial from Makezine that describes the fundamental concept of synthesizing waveform and how to manipulate it in real time.

Web-controlled AC outlets

Posted on November 8, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

This Instructable describes the hardware hacking of Stainley’s remote controlled power outlet and modifying it to make it controllable through web or smartphone using Electric Imp. The Electric Imp is a WiFi enabled development platform powered by a Cortex-M3 processor core enclosed inside a tiny package that looks like a SD card. The Electric Imp is the core of the system operation. When the button on the Web App is activated, an AJAX HTTP Request is made to a URL specific to your Imp. This request is sent to the Imp Agent in the Electric Imp cloud that is specifically associated

Rapid Development Board for PIC12F Series Microcontrollers

Posted on November 5, 2013 by R-B 2 comments

The 12F series of PIC microcontrollers are handy little 8-pin devices designed for small embedded applications that do not require too many I/O resources, and where small size is advantageous. These applications include a wide range of everyday products such as hair dryers, electric toothbrushes, rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, and blenders. Despite their small size, the PIC12F series microcontrollers offer many advanced features including wide operating voltage, internal programmable oscillator, 4 channels of 10-bit ADC, on-board EEPROM memory, on-chip voltage reference, multiple communication peripherals (UART, SPI, and I2C), PWM, and more. Today we are introducing a new development

Yet another voltage monitor for car’s battery

Posted on October 31, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

A couple of years ago I built a digital voltage monitor system for my car’s battery and its charging system. It plugs into the car’s cigarette lighter receptacle and displays the instantaneous output voltage across the battery terminals on a 4-digit seven segment LED display. I used Microchip’s PIC16F1827 microcontroller and it’s built-in Fixed Reference Voltage (FVR) module to achieve better A/D conversion accuracy while measuring the battery voltage. Here’s an instructable on building a similar device but using ATtiny13 microcontroller. Instead of displaying real battery voltage, however, this project uses three LEDs as visual indication of battery condition.

Solar-powered outdoor weather station with PC logging and graphs

Posted on October 29, 2013 by R-B 2 comments

I have always enjoyed reading/doing projects that involve sensing various environmental parameters and recording them. This Solar-powered outdoor weather station built upon the Arduino platform measures the ambient temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, and send these parameters to a PC using XBee RF modules. The measurements are recorded on the PC and presented in nice charts showing their temporal trends. The beauty of this project is that the outdoor module is fully powered through a Lipo battery which is charged through a solar panel. Sensors used in this project are DHT22 for temperature and relative humidity measurements, and BMP0805 for measuring

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