After several questions on how to use the NXT Shield I decided to create an Arduino library. All the code is available at github: https://github.com/TKJElectronics/NXTShield.
The library is pretty easy to use, I have provided three examples witch demonstrates all the libraries functionalities.
I works with all official Arduinos including Arduino Mega. To use the ultrasonic sensor with an Arduino Mega, one have to connect pin 20 (SDA) to A4 and pin 21 (SCL) to A5. A new revision of the shield might use the two extra SDA and SCL pins that are near to the AREF pin on r3 versions of the new Arduino boards.
Below are some photos of the NXT Shield: Read more…
Evaluation Type: Development Board, ARM Cortex-M4 Application you used the part in: QuadCopter Was everything in the box required?: The box only contains the board itself, nothing else What were the biggest problems encountered?: It is hard to find a good but inexpensive or free compiler
I have been watching different videos of QuadCopters recently and I’ve been pretty amused. The way they fly and the way they control their movements is unbelievable – it almost looks like a bug.
If you don’t know what a QuadCopter is you should have a look at this video where he shows his homebuilt QuadCopter and his acrobatic skills with it.
So I decided to start reading some more about the materials behind these QuadCopters and how they manage to stabilize in the air.
In this blog post I will try to describe the different steps I have been thru to plan, design and build the prototype of my QuadCopter. There will be coming some more blog posts later on describing how to get the QuadCopter running, programming it, tuning it etc.
I have previous thought about buying a universal remote like this one, as I was tired of grabbing my JVC remote for my stereo everytime I had to turn it on, off or turn the volume up or down. But then I discovered Ken Shirriff’s IR Library for the Arduino. Normally the library didn’t support neither the Panasonic or JVC protocol, but I discovered that somebody else had already added them. See the forked github library. At first I simple downloaded the library and tested whenever it could decode the Panasonic protocol and send commands to my JVC stereo. It had to tweak the library a bit, but then it worked just fine.
I thought it would be a bit overkill to use an Arduino and I didn’t want to rewrite the whole library, so I decided to use another AVR’s but in a much smaller package, the ATtiny85. Which is 8-pin AVR. Read more…
Hello everybody
I have for a long time wanted to build a remote controllable balancing robot aka Segway – that’s was actually the main reason why I created the PS3 Bluetooth Library both for Arduino and the FEZ Devices. It has been a long time since the sneak peak and the performance has been improved a lot since then. The original one had a FEZ Rhino as the main processor, but I discovered that it was not fast enough to read the encoders, as it is not running embedded code. Also I was already using more than 10ms per loop, which I used as a fixed time loop, so I decided to step up a notch and go for a much more powerful device: the mbed microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-M3 running 96MHz.
It might have been possible with just a normal Arduino (NB: I have now ported the code to Arduino, see update for the code), but I didn’t want the speed of the processor to be an issue, so I decided to go for the mbed. The robot also features an Arduino Duemilanove with a USB Host Shield on top running a sketch based on my PS3 Bluetooth Library. The mbed board actually has USB Host functionality, but I decided not to port the PS3 Bluetooth Library as my original thought were to use an Arduino Due, but as you might know it hasn’t been released yet, despite the Arduino team announced, that it would be released by the end of 2011. But as soon as it is released I think I will port the code to it instead.
Video Demonstration
Here is a short video demonstration of the robot and me explaining some of the concepts of the design and how it works:
Are you going to CeBIT 2012 but are still missing the tickets?
We have been given quite an amount of tickets from different vendors. So we would like to see you there too and would therefor like to offer you a free ticket (€34 normally).
If you are interested in this limited offer please send us an email at: mail@tkjelectronics.dk
The tickets will be given on a first serve basis.
Yesterday our “Project Idea” contest ended and we have spent the day reading all the project ideas from you.
Some of them were more advanced than others but we have received a great number of project ideas and would like to thank you all for participating.
So now we are ready to present the winning Project Idea:
Project Title: Use of a Micro controller in a 50MHz to 1GHz spectrum analyser project.
This project idea was sent to us by Roberto Savo, an RF Electronics Engineer from South Africa. Read more…
Soon a BeagleBoard competitor will be released – the Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi - Embedded ARM11 Computer
The Raspberry Pi is a small credit card sized ARM11 embedded computer, capable of running embedded Linux or WinCE.
When released it is supposed to be available in two models, where the biggest difference is the ethernet connector.
The first model, which comes with 128MB RAM, 1x USB but no ethernet will be priced at $25.
That’s an insane price for an embedded computer capable of doing HD video by using the onboard HDMI connector.
The second model, which comes with 256MB RAM, 2x USB and also ethernet, will be priced at $35.
And most of the times embedded applications requires some kind of internet connection as almost everything in this world becomes online. So why not spend those $10 extra to get the ethernet capability too.
The Raspberry Pi is expected to be sold in the end of February, though the initial stock is limited to around 10.000pcs so you have to be fast. Hopefully we will be able to do a review of the board soon.
It is going very well with us, TKJ Electronics. We have a lot of ongoing projects and try as much as possible to update the blog with information about these projects.
Though we thought it would be very interesting to get some feedback from all of you brainy guys out there too, so why not make a contest about it – and as announced previously there will of course be a price.
So instead of it being us publishing information about our projects all the time we would like to know more about your project ideas or what projects you would like to see designed.
The only requirements for the project ideas are the following
The project should include some kind of microprocessor (PIC, AVR, Arduino, mbed, LPC, STM32, other ARM etc.)
The project should be affordable with a budget of $200 – this is just the electronics cost for use in the development (not the target price)
The project can’t be something we already have done, but it is ok to use parts of our previous projects
The project idea description should be at least 75 words
