Selfiebot: An autonomous photo capturing system

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Two Cornell University students, Michael Wang and Jennifer Qian, have built Selfiebot, a personal photo companion that will capture your special moments autonomously. It consists of a physical selfie robot unit with camera holder (webcam in this example) that can pan and tilt the camera for proper positioning, and a control module residing in a laptop computer that relays pan and tilt commands to the robot based on the feedback received from the camera. The user gets control of various settings such as image properties, centering properties, and photo taking parameters. Michael and Jennifer write, We have designed and constructed an

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ATXMega Primer

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The XMega series is a powerful addition to the existing arsenal of Atmel’s AVR-core micros. As much as I have personally studied about it so far and felt, the XMega series incorporates many features of conventional 32-bit ARM micros like alternate I/O pin mapping functionalities, sophisticated clock options and data buses, multiple communication platforms that have several uses, variety of capture-PWM options, 12-bit ADCs and DACs, DMA controller, USB hardware, etc. with the good old AVR core. Thus you get one hell of an 8/16 bit MCU that can fulfil your wildest micro desires. In terms of unit cost, resources

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STM32 Programming Tips and Tricks

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I remember that once in the beginning I said that I don’t want to buy a programmer/debugger hardware for learning a new MCU like the STM32 and also STM32s already come with built-in bootloader to facilitate programming via USART just like Arduino. Still the second is true. Well what about the first? To my own surprise I actually acquired a number of STM32-related stuffs since the time I started playing and exploring them. I actually bought both ST-Link 1 and 2 programmer-debuggers and several STM32 boards from Waveshare Electronics (http://www.wvshare.com). I believe learning new stuffs is more valuable than anything

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XMega I/O Ports

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Any microcontroller must have I/O pins for taking inputs and providing outputs. The ATXMega32A4U just like any other micro has 34 programmable I/O pins divided unevenly amongst six IO ports. Most I/O ports are 8 bit wide. XMega I/Os have digital, analog and special purpose functions. Some I/O pins have more than one use. A quick view of the XMega I/O pins reveals the purpose of these pins.

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Breadboard adapter for ESP8266 module

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ESP8266 is an inexpensive serial-to-wifi tranceiver chip that allows to connect any microcontroller with a serial port to a WiFi network. Because of its simplicity and low cost, it is getting popular among hobbyists for building Internet of Things (IoT) applications. While there are varieties of breakout boards available for ESP8266 from the Chinese markets, the most popular one is the ESP-01 version that provides access to the ESP8266 pins through a 2×4 male header. While the headers are 0.1″ pitch, the pin arrangements are not breadboard friendly and are not labeled on board, which makes it little inconvenient for

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