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chipKIT Tutorial 5: Pulse width modulation (PWM)

Posted on August 24, 2012 by R-B One comment

Pulse width modulation (PWM) is a technique of controlling the amount of power delivered to an electronic load using an on-off digital signal. The key idea behind this technique is that the average DC value of the digital signal, and hence the power delivered to the load, can be varied by varying the duty cycle of the signal. This method is commonly used for controlling speeds of DC motors and brightness of lamps. The switching mode power supplies are also based on the PWM technique. In this tutorial, we will discuss about the PWM pins of the chipKIT Uno32 board

Tilt sensing illustration with DE0-NANO FPGA board

Posted on August 16, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

After building a 40 pin breakout board for the DE0-Nano Chris from PyroElectro wanted to test it out with something fun but not overly complex. So he decided to try something fun with an accelerometer available on the DE0-Nano board. In this tutorial, he shows how an accelerometer works, how it can be used to detect tilt and also how the tilt ‘value’ can be visually displayed on a large array of LEDs.

Breakout board for PIC16F1847 microcontroller

Posted on August 9, 2012 by R-B 13 comments

This is an improved version of my 18-pin PIC16F series breadboard module that I have used in many of my PIC tutorials and projects published in this website. The new version has got a +5V power supply regulator on-board and a 2.1mm female barrel jack for DC input from a wall adapter. The 18-pin PIC16F series microcontrollers are still very popular among hobbyists and beginners because of their compact size, low cost, and simplicity. The PIC16F1847 is the latest release in this series and is equipped with lot more peripherals and enhanced features than its predecessors. This breakout board will be helpful

Breakout board for DE0-Nano FPGA development board

Posted on August 9, 2012 by R-B Leave a comment

DE0-Nano is a great FPGA development and education board featuring the Altera Cyclone® IV 4C22 FPGA with 22,320 Logic elements (LEs), 594 Embedded memory (Kbits), 66 Embedded 18 x 18 multipliers, 4 General-purpose PLLs, and 153 Maximum FPGA I/O pins. Since not all of these I/O pins are used very often, Chris from PyroElectro has made his own expansion board for easy prototyping with DE0-Nano. He designed a PCB for his breakout board that basically connects to the 2×20 pin headers on the DE0-Nano through an IDE cable and makes those I/O pins easily available for prototyping on breadboard.

Building wireless sensor applications using Dorji’s DRF5150S and DRF4432S RF modules (Part 1)

Posted on August 4, 2012 by R-B 10 comments

Dorji Applied Technology is a China-based company that primarily focuses on building different types of RF modules that can be easily incorporated in designing wireless data loggers, sensor network, telemetry and other wireless applications. Their products mostly use RF transceiver chips from ADI, Infineon, and Silicon Labs. Some of their RF modules have an additional preprogrammed microcontroller that allows direct interface of selected analog and digital sensors to the module. This means you don’t need any external MCU or to write codes for these sensors. I have been playing with their DRF5150S and DRF4432S RF modules for past couple weeks

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