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Solar powered USB power bank

Posted on September 26, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

Solo-lab’s new project article is about building a rechargeable USB power bank which harvests energy by using a solar panel. It uses a 3.7V, 4000mAh LiPo battery to store the electric energy generated by the solar panel. The LiPo charging circuit is based on MCP73831, which is a miniature single cell, fully integrated LiPo charge manament controller. The output of the battery is converted to 5V using a step up converter based on LT1302-5. The 5V output is available via USB ports. MCP73831 is miniature single-cell, fully integrated Li-Ion,Li-Po charge management controller. Since the input voltage range is 3.75V to

Audio transmission using Laser

Posted on September 25, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

Armand & Victor did an interesting experiment about sending audio over a laser beam. They used a 250mW diode laser, modulated its output with an audio signal, and aimed the modulated beam to a solar cell located at more than 400 meters away. The output of the solar cell is directly fed to an high power amplifier to reconstruct the audio. You wouldn’t believe the demodulated audio was surprisingly good quality.

Rubidium standard real time clock for tracking local time dilation

Posted on September 25, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

According to General Relativity, we all experience finite amount of time dilation in our daily lives, depending upon our location, elevation, and velocity. At the speeds we travel at and the elevation we experience in everyday, time dilation is so small that it’s not detectable to us. But the high accuracy of atomic clocks have provided evidence for this effect even at our everyday speed. Cameron Meredith has shared an interesting project on Hackaday.io about using a rubidium atomic frequency standard to continuously track local time dilation effects relative to a reference GPS clock. This project uses a rubidium atomic frequency standard

Solar powered FM radio and mp3 player

Posted on September 24, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

Khaleel123 has posted an Instructable on how he built a solar-powered FM radio/mp3 player using some leftover wood flooring, salvaged pc speakers, four ni-cad rechargeable AA batteries, and inexpensive FM Radio/mp3 player module and solar panels that he bought on ebay. The FM radio module cost him less than $3 and is capable to play mp3 audio through an SD card or USB drive. Khaleel123 writes, The one I used has an operating voltage range between 5-12 and it is 4 ohm stable @ 3 watts rms x2. So knowing this its safe to use the following combination of components for the power source.

RGB audio visualizer using FPGA

Posted on September 23, 2016 by R-B Leave a comment

Sam Miller, Sahil Gupta, and Mashrur Mohiuddin built a 64×64 RGB LED matrix audio visualizer as their final project for the ECE5760 Microcontroller Design course at Cornell. The visualizer responds to a musical input in real time with a graphic animation on the RGB panel using vertical bars, balls, and particle to enhance the user’s listening experience. The RGB visualizer runs off of an Altera DE2-115 FPGA, which handles all the controls and processing of data for the 64×64 LED Matrix as well as the beat detection and audio output. Our system starts with a musical input from the 3.5mm line-in input from the FPGA.

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