Embedded Lab | Embedded Systems tutorials, projects, and more …

Bi-color LED matrix display board with Bluetooth

Posted on October 29, 2013 by R-B 4 comments

I shared the details of my single-color 8X40 LED matrix display board project here a few months ago. Here is a nice instructable on making a 7 Bi-color 8×8 LED Matrix Scrolling Text Display with Bluetooth support; which means you can send messages and commands to the display via Bluetooth using a Smart Phone. The author illustrates using an Android-based phone, but any devices capable of sending text messages via Bluetooth would work. The project uses 7 Bi-color 8×8 LED matrices, each controlled by two MAX7219 chips. The beauty of using MAX7219 is they take a lot of work off the micro-controller and

Nickelphone: Coin-based Midi Keyboard

Posted on October 29, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

Tyler Bletsch’s Nickelphone is a coin-based music keyboard that has 15 nickels and 10 pennies arranged on a traditional 25-key piano-style layout and act as touch sensors. It can emit simple square wave tones through an onboard piezo buzzer, but its primary use is as a MIDI keyboard, so it can drive a full synthesizer (like FL Studio on PC). Tyler used an ATmega644 microcontroller for his project so that he would have enough I/O pins (each key uses its own I/O pin) for the 25 keys.

Microchip’s new PIC32 Bluetooth® Audio Development Kit

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

Microchip has announced the new PIC32 Bluetooth® Audio Development Kit that enables custom application development on the PIC32 microcontrollers (MCUs) for Bluetooth and USB digital audio solutions. The PIC32 Bluetooth Audio Development Kit that ships with audio streaming demo code delivers up to 24-bit, 192 kHz audio and has been tested with over 100 different Bluetooth audio enabled devices, spanning 18 different manufacturers. The Bluetooth Hardware module and the Bluetooth A2DP audio software have been Bluetooth.org certified, saving the developer significant certification costs. The modular design allows developers to swap out the included daughter boards (one for Audio and one

Free PCBs for open source projects

Posted on October 27, 2013 by R-B 2 comments

Electronics-Lab has announced to provide 5 pieces of free PCBs for your design if you open-source and publish your project on their website. Get a professionally manufactured PCB for your design completely FREE! We are happy to announce our new PCB giveaway program for the OSHW community. We will professionally manufacture 5 pieces of your PCB design and ship them to you worldwide completely free. We just ask to publish your Open Source design on Electronics-Lab.com projects section (under your name) and you will get your PCBs for free in 15-25 days (depending on destination). All designs submitted will be manually reviewed

Automatic re-filler for your pet’s water bowl

Posted on October 21, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

This Arduino-based Pet Water Warden helps your pets to get enough water supply when you are gone. It uses two homemade dip probes to sense the water level in a pet’s drinking bowl and automatically activate a pump to refill it from a reservoir when it gets low. The project also incorporates an Arduino Ethernet shield to send a tweet when the reservoir runs out.