Category Archives: circuits
Networked Bed Presence sensor
John Schimmel and I had a meeting with a friend the other day who has chronic condition, and is looking for tools to notify her family and friends of her activity at home, so she can live more independently. A … Continue reading
Using PepperMill to turn a motor into a sensor
Nicolas Villar sent me a sample of the PepperMill, a new sensor board he and Steve Hodges designed at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. It’s a nifty little board. You attach a DC motor and the board can an output … Continue reading
Bluetooth Mate with Lilypad
Coming late to the game, I’m trying out a Bluetooth Mate from SparkFun with an Arduino Lilypad.Overall, it’s a nice Bluetooth radio to use with microcontrollers. A few thoughts on getting it working:
Intervalometer and motion trigger for Nikon D90
Matt Mets has written a nice Nikon remote control library for Arduino. I used it to make a motion trigger and intervalometer. It looks like this:
Reading data from a uLog logger, saving to a file
Here’s a Processing sketch that takes data from Sparkfun’s uLog datalogger via a serial port, and saves the results to a file. To use this, you’ll need: uLog datalogger with some data on it USB-to-serial adaptor; there are many types … Continue reading
CNMAT resources archive
Berkeley’s CNMAT (center for new music and audio technologies) has a nice resource archive, with pictures. Useful if you’re looking for electronic parts, microphones, and other things audio-related. Similar to RISDpedia and ITPedia, among others, very useful. Thanks to Tom … Continue reading
A Few Good Reasons Why Peter Knight Rocks
Peter Knight works with Massimo and Alex and co. at Tinker.it. He’s written some great AVR code, which is useful in Arduino. For example: Secret Thermometer takes advantage of the ATMega’s internal thermometer. Turns your ’328-based Arduino into a thermometer … Continue reading
Physical x Wonderfl
Shigeru Kobayashi, who made Gainer and Funnel, has made yet another nifty tool for physical computing: physical x wonderfl. It combines Gainer, Funnel, Firmata, Arduino, and Wonderfl.
Controlling Lots of Outputs from a Microcontroller
Making LED displays is fun. There are a a few tools that get used all the time, from row-column scanning to LED driver chips to multplexers and shift registers. This tutorial discusses some of the more popular methods for controlling … Continue reading
CD4099 Addressable Latch Used to Control LEDs
This tutorial will show how to control multiple LED outputs from a microcontroller using a CD4099B addressable latch. Parts you’ll need: CD4099B addressable latch Arduino microcontroller (Any model will do) 16 LEDs