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Hacking IKEA LAMPAN table lamp

Posted on April 23, 2015 by R-B Leave a comment

Last month, we looked at a IKEA Molgan Lamp hack and adding ESP8266 connectivity to it. Here is another IKEA lamp enhancement project by Jesus Echavarria from Spain, where he hacked IKEA LAMPAN to include features like manual RGB controller to set the light colour, a timeout to turn off the light after 30 minutes without changes and a bluetooth connection to control the lamp with a smartphone or tablet. The system is based on a PIC18F2550 microcontroller, with a 12MHz external crystal. This allows run up to 48MHz internal code (using the internal PLL), necessary to manage the RGB leds. The RGB led’s

Improving PWM-to-Analog voltage conversion

Posted on April 22, 2015 by R-B One comment

Modern day microcontrollers are equipped with one or more dedicated PWM peripherals built-in that can be used to generate analog output voltages with varying range by just using a basic RC filter circuit. While this is a very simple and practical approach, it has some limitations such as it can only drive high impedance load and the processor should continuously output the PWM signal to maintain the output voltage constant, which prohibits the processor to be put into a low power shutdown state when required. This application note from Linear Technology describes the use of LTC644 and LTC2645 chips, which are dual

Meet SlushEngine, an easy controller for up to 4 bi-polar stepper motors

Posted on April 21, 2015 by R-B One comment

Roboteurs, Inc., a Canada-based company introduces SlushEngine, a smart stepper motor driver for the Raspberry Pi platform to control stepper motors with precision, speed, and simplicity. It is compatible with varieties of stepper motors and is controlled through a Pythan code running on the Raspberry Pi. SlushEngine: Model X technical specifications Controls up to 4 bi-polar stepper motors Max 7A / motor 9-35 V DC operating range 1-128 microstepping capabilities Integrated motion engine in stepper driver 4 limit switch inputs 4 general purpose industrial inputs 4 general purpose industrial outputs (3A / 24V) 8 additional logic level I/O Thermistor temperature sensing

Domino: Another wifi hardware development platform

Posted on April 21, 2015 by R-B One comment

A global team of Makers has announced the launch of Domino, which is an affordable and high-performance 802.11 bgn WiFi hardware platform for IoT applications with a modular design architecture, unlimited extension capabilities and Arduino compatibility. Domino.IO features a modular design architecture. At the heart of all boards is the Domino Core, which is a low-cost, high-performance 802.11n WiFi module based on Qualcomm/Atheros AR9331 WiSoC. Domino Core is completed by Domino Pi and Domino Qi. Domino Pi breaks out all the pins of the Domino Core to easy 2.54mm pitch headers, integrates an USB-UART bridge, +5V/2A DC/DC power supply, power and wireless LEDs and

DIY Spectrophotometer using Arduino

Posted on April 21, 2015 by R-B Leave a comment

Spectrophotometery is a quantitative measurement of the transmission properties of a chemical substance as a function of wavelength, and the device used for this purpose is known as Spectrophotometer. It operates by passing a beam of light through a sample and measuring the intensity of light reaching a detector through the sample. This Instructable describes an Arduino controlled DIY Spectrophotometer made by two undergraduate biochemistry students-Peter Elphick and Ed Tye, for their final-year lab project. We wanted to make a spectrophotometer that would measure the concentration of a dye called OPD; a common dye in biological assay kits. In addition to reading the absorbance of the

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