Blinky Ugly Sweater
For our holiday ugly sweater party, our web developer, Sam Logan, added some blinking LEDs to his using a chipKIT microcontroller. His Instructable was featured on the chipKIT blog.
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Will Winter Wane?
Happy Groundhog Day! At Digilent, we have Punxsutawney Sam the groundhog to tell us whether we’ll have more winter to look forward to. Our 3D-printed friend is here to tell us whether winter will wane!
A Listening Calculator
When working with microcontrollers, it’s pretty straightforward to have your system board “listen” for an input that you would give it and have it do some sort of action to show that it noticed your input, such as pressing a button to light up an LED. Listening to a set of inputs and then comparing them to a predetermined set, like in the Simon Says game, is a little more involved but definitely doable. But what if we did not compare to any internal values and the system board has no idea how many inputs we might provide?
Running 5+ Servos on a uC32…Can I Do It?
In the not too distant past, we made a couple of posts on Pmods that can help drive motors as well as a post on stepper motors. Today, we’re going to check out running multiple servo motors on a chipKIT board. Why would we want to do this? Well, aside from the nice feeling that comes from successfully doing some extreme multitasking, we’d also be able to run some super cool mechatronics projects, such as a robot arm!
Direct Register Manipulation on your Microcontroller
I really enjoy what I do here at Digilent. I get to work with some of the best tools available for students, professionals, and hobbyists alike. One of the things I like most is how easy it is to get your hands on a good quality microcontroller board, like the chipKIT Uno32. But even once you get a good board, it will still need to be programmed.
Creating Custom Characters on the PmodOLED
As many of you know, it is possible with many types of displays, such as LCDs and LED displays, to create your own custom characters and, naturally, display them. However, to create your own characters, you need to be able to create a bitmap of how your character (or characters) look. We will be working with the PmodOLED and it’s corresponding library to create our own characters.
Microcontroller Dice Roller — Made in the MakerSpace
If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you’ve probably seen something about us setting up our very own MakerSpace here at Digilent. We’ve come a long way from a few cluttered cubicles to getting our MakerSpace up and running. We have just about everything you can think of to make any project imaginable: a 3D printer, a soldering station, breadboards, buttons, copious amounts of LEDs, and more! I thought up a just-for-fun project and wanted to test drive the MakerSpace to see what I could build.
Halloween Box Monster
With Halloween coming up soon, I decided to make a cool Halloween prop using Digilent products. After grabbing a chipKIT uC32, a couple of shift registers, a bunch of LEDs, breadboard jumper wires, and a PmodMAXSONAR, I was able to make a distance detecting Halloween Box Monster.
Simon Says… with LEDs!
At one point or another, we have all played the “Simon Says” game. In this game, one person, Simon (or Susan, Chad, or whoever happens to be the leader), will say “Simon says” and tell all of the other players to do something, such as raise their left hand. The catch in this game is that if the leader tells the other players to do something without saying the words “Simon says” and the other players do it anyway, they’re out. I personally really enjoy playing Simon Says, but I thought it could even be more fun if you could play Simon Says with a bunch of LEDs…
Temperature-Sensing Coffee Coaster
Coffee is taken very seriously here at Digilent, as it is in most workplaces. Something that used to make me mad was not knowing when my coffee hit that perfect “Goldilocks” temperature zone where it didn’t burn my mouth but was warm enough to fully enjoy. I am currently working on developing a thermocouple Pmod using Analog Devices MAX31855 and thought of a great application project. If I could somehow sense how hot the temperature of the coffee was, I could have a microcontroller tell me when my coffee hit the perfect temperature range!
Arms and Motors and Sensors, Oh My!
I’m very proud to say that my For Cheap Robots project is still going strong! As some of you may recall, at the beginning of last month, I announced the beginning of my For Cheap Robots series here on the Digilent blog. Since then, I’ve added several more tutorials to the list and gotten a huge amount of positive feedback. I want to thank any and all of you who here who follow the Digilent Blog and decided to pop over to Instructables to check it out!
Proximity-Sensing LEDs Part 2: On a PCB
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I designed the proximity-sensing LED circuit to eventually move it on to a printed circuit board, or PCB. This was my first experience with PCB layout, and thankfully it was successful! The board I designed is in the picture below. We ordered 6 “prints” and soldered them in our MakerSpace. I also included extra vias (electrical connections between the layers of the board) so that we could connect multiple boards together.
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