PIC32 Project: Piano gloves

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Piano gloves is another interesting project accomplished by three Cornell students, Sean Carroll, Natalie Moore, and James Talmage, who just passed Bruce Land’s ECE 4670 course on microcontrollers. They created a pair of gloves that can play a grand piano sound with the bending of fingers. A flex sensor attached to each finger on the gloves senses when the user bends a finger. The sensor output goes to a PIC32 processor via a Schimitt trigger circuit. The PIC32 processor, on detecting finger motions, synthesizes and plays appropriate notes on a speaker through a 12-bit DAC. They write, The genesis of this design

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PIC32 smart watch

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Matthew Filipek‘s DIY smart watch is PIC32-powered and features a 1.7 inch touch screen, SD card, Bluetooth module, and other apps with total cost of build less than $100. Matthew writes, The watch currently has 3 apps: a settings app where the user can set screen brightness, change the time and date, and change the theme of the user interface; a game app, where the user controls a small paddle with the touch screen and attempts to deflect balls into goals; and a paint app, where the user touches to draw one of 8 selectable colors to the screen. The

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PIC32 project: Wake-U-Up system

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Zhiyong Hao and Zhuo Chen from Cornell University designed a new type of ‘Wake-up Assistant’ for their ECE 4760 course’s final project. Powered by a PIC32 processor, it is designed to wake up a person in a more comfortable and effective way, compared to a normal noisy alarm clock. Their system includes an LED light that works as a reading light before going to bed and brightens gradually in the morning time to simulate the sunrise. An accelerometer placed under the pillow monitors and analyzes the motion of the sleeper to detect when he/she is in a light sleep phase

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chipKIT Tutorial 7: Using Nokia 5110 LCD

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In Tutorial 4, we learnt interfacing an HD44780-based LCD to a chipKIT board for displaying alphanumeric output. Today, we will see how to connect a NOKIA 5110 graphical LCD (used in Nokia 5110 cell phones), which is a 84×48 pixel monochrome display of about 1.5″ diagonal in size. The display can be used for graphics, text, and bitmaps. Theory Nokia 5110 LCD was used in Nokia’s popular 5110 and 3310 model cell phones. It is a 48×84 pixels matrix LCD driven by the low-power PCD8544 controller chip. It is powered by 3.3V and includes on-chip generation of LCD supply and bias voltages, thus requiring minimum external components

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Arduino Crowtail and Easy Pulse Plugin

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Arduino Crowtail is a modular and ready-to-use building block set from Elecrow for rapid prototyping with Arduino. It consists of a base Arduino Uno shield to which various sensor and I/O modules can be conveniently interfaced through standardized connectors. In this example, I am going to illustrate how to use the Easy Pulse Plugin sensor with a Crowtail base shield and a Crowtail OLED module to make a stand-alone pulse meter.

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