Monthly Archives: March 2009

8×8 LED matrix control on an Arduino Mega

Once you’ve mastered microcontroller programming, you might be tempted to control a lot of LEDs.  Lots of people have this desire once they master the basics. Many microcontrollers have a limited number of output pins, however, so you might think … Continue reading

Posted in AVR, arduino/wiring, circuits | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Controlling Inkjet Printers from a microcontroller

There was an interesting thread on the Sketching in Hardware mailing list a while back on how to control an inkjet printer.   Wendy Ju started the discussion. Following are some of the links from that thread: A closed, proprietary portable … Continue reading

Posted in AVR, BX-24, PIC, arduino/wiring, circuits, pBasic (Basic stamp) | Tagged | 1 Comment

Dynohubs: power from bikers

Lots of people are into mechanical generation of electrical power these days, so here’s a nice tip from the guys at Uncommon Projects: dynohubs.  I had a note in my inbox for months that just said “dynohubs, Tarikh.”  So I … Continue reading

Posted in circuits, construction | Tagged | Leave a comment

Surplus Center

Mike Olson likes to move heavy things.  So when he says something like this: Hands down the best site for finding cheap powerful motors is: www.surpluscenter.com You can’t search by torque, but they usually have an excellent seclection of powerful … Continue reading

Posted in circuits, construction | Tagged | Leave a comment

RFID to Web Interface

This tutorial introduces a Processing interface sketch provides a GUI for the command-line interface written into the Arduino RFID example. You should read that tutorial first. The sketch shown here also allows you to upload tags it reads to O’Reilly’s … Continue reading

Posted in PHP, Processing, arduino/wiring | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Arduino-based RFID reader

This tutorial shows how to make an Arduino-based RFID reader that reads Mifare tags and stores them in EEPROM. It is a modification of Alex Zivanovic‘s code on Tinker.it. Thanks to Alex and Massimo Banzi for the reference. Once you’ve … Continue reading

Posted in PHP, Processing, arduino/wiring | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Writing to Mifare RFID tags

Mifare RFID tags, like other RFID tags, contain a serial number that can be read using an RFID reader, but they also have a limited amount of memory space that you can write data to, and read back from.  This … Continue reading

Posted in Processing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Reading Mifare RFID Tags

This tutorial explains how to read from Mifare RFID tags from your computer using a Sonmicro SM130 read/write module. The sketch below is written in Processing using my SonmicroReader library. The SM130 has a TTL serial interface that you can … Continue reading

Posted in Processing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Sonmicro RFID Reader Library for Processing

Last year, I worked with Timo Arnall and Einar Martinussen and Jørn Knutsen on a Processing library to read and write to Mifare RFID tags using the Sonmicro SM130 read/write module.  Here it is, with a few improvements and bug … Continue reading

Posted in Processing | Tagged , , | 1 Comment