Meet CrowPi2: An all-in-one portable Raspberry Pi laptop for STEAM learning and rapid prototyping

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When it comes to STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, art and math) education, the Raspberry Pi is perhaps the most affordable, powerful, and versatile learning tool for all ages and skill levels. The versatility of this little computer comes from its incredible interconnectivity feature that offers direct connection of sensors and electromechanical components, thereby allowing the users to learn embedded hardware and programming in a very simple and engaging way. Since it first came out in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has been the most adventurous tool of teachers in the classroom to foster learning, awareness of computer programming, and extend the

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Tinkering TI MSP430F5529

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In my past tutorials on MSP430s, I demonstrated how to get started with MSP430 general purpose microcontrollers from Texas Instruments (TI). Those tutorials covered most aspects of low and mid-end MSP430G2xxx series microcontrollers. For those tutorials, TI’s official software suite – Code Composer Studio (CCS) – an Eclipse-based IDE and GRACE – a graphical peripheral initialization and configuration tool similar to STM32CubeMX were used. To me, those low and mid-end TIs chips are cool and offer best resources one can expect at affordable prices and small physical form-factors. I also briefly discussed about advanced MSP430 microcontrollers and the software resources

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Making a SPL dB Meter

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In the 1980s, there was no internet as like today and so the sources of entertainment were televisions, radios and cassette players. When I was a kid, we had an audio cassette player. We used it to play songs but my imagination was always fixed to its VU meter display with its fancy readings as shown below. It changed with the volume of the speakers and matched rhythmically with the sound coming out of it. During my engineering career, I got to know about the Decibel scale and sound pressure measurement. It soon became a goal for me to design

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Exploring STC 8051 Microcontrollers

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8051 microcontrollers are the first-generation microcontrollers that sparked the modern embedded-system era and established the basic concepts for almost all microcontrollers. In the early 1980s, 8051 microcontrollers were first introduced by Intel. Later other manufacturers like Philips (NXP), Atmel (now Microchip), Silicon Labs, Maxim, etc took the 8051 architecture and introduced their variants of 8051s. Today there are hundreds of such companies which still manufactures this old school legendary micro. of them have even added more features like ADCs, communication peripherals like SPI and I2C, etc that were not originally incepted or integrated. There are even some manufacturers who produce

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