I bought my son a electronics snap kit about 2 years ago, and quickly completed some projects that were in the included book. This was fun for us, a good start, but there was more. I began teaching him about series and parallel circuits, passive components, and different types of sensors. I then said, “Without looking at the book, build a flashlight. OK, good, now build a fan with a switchable light. OK, now build a…” Continue reading
Hi everyone! I had an idea a while ago to modify this toy ray gun my kids have. The problem you ask? Noise. Too much noise. The bribe? more blinky in exchange for less noise. Here I will take a toy noise gun, upgrade the lighting, reduce the noise, and save parental brain cells! It’s a win win operation. So why the motivation to do this today? Because I gave it back to them this morning..
Schematic PDF here (if you don’t have Eagle)
I am getting ready to sell some kits and wanted a good way to photograph the assembly without fumbling around trying to hold a camera in one hand and a project in the other. The answer? An intervalometer. A device that can send an IR signal to my Nikon, triggering the shutter. The video above explains all of the features including; automatic delay calculation, auto stop, multiple LCD and LED feedback options, Li-Po charging, FTDI headers, and manual control via button or plug-in foot switch.
This project will work with most Nikon DSLR cameras without changing anything, but can easily be adapted to work with Canon, Sony, or any camera that will accept an IR remote.
You can get nice RGB LCD’s, as well as the foot switch at Adafruit Industries. They even have positive character, negative character (the one used in this project), positive graphic, and negative graphic versions!
Eagle intervalometer schematic (Eagle format)
Eagle intervalometer schematic (PDF format)
Intervalometer Parts List (Numbers format)
Hi everyone, been a while since my last post, but I have been a busy new daddy. 🙂 I wanted to demonstrate what PWM output was and how to use it nicely in a sketch. I’m really big on ramping lights on and off (my entire house is set up that way) and would like to share how do accomplish that. I also wanted to use a video to show PWM outputs on a scope to help me explain the process.
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM, but also sometimes referred to as Pulse-Duration Modulation -PDM) is the manipulating (modulating) of the width of a fixed pulse. The pulses are sent at the same voltage and frequency, so just the width of the pulse is changed. In the screen shot above the fixed voltage is 3.2V and the Frequency is 490Hz.
You can grab the serial controlled Arduino code here, or the shorter fading sketch here.
This is just a quick post about a board I made to program a whole bunch of ATmega 328’s for some kits I’m making. I am ordering the 328’s in bulk, so they are brand new and do not have an Arduino bootloader on them. One of the ways you can get an Arduino bootloader on a factory fresh 328 is use an Arduino Uno and a USBTiny. Sure, I could pop about 100 of these into an Uno, but that would be a lot of work as well as wear and tear on the 28 DIP socket on my Uno.
The answer? A ZIF socket! These are fantastic! Anyone who has installed/upgraded a CPU in a computer knows what these are. ZIF stands for Zero Insertion Force. That means you drop the chip in the socket very easy, then pull a lever down to secure the contacts and prevent the chip from bouncing out of there. Making swapping out a bunch of chips to program them a lot easier, faster, and less prone to damage to the pins or chips!
You can get these 28 Pin ZIF sockets at Adafruit, and for cheep! There is also a 40 pin version if your heart or project so desires. Sparkfun has this part in their Eagle library, if you don’t have it, and use eagle, I would get it. There is a lot of good stuff in there. 🙂 And on another note, if you don’t have the Adafruit Eagle library, it’s worth having also.
You can download the board and schematic Eagle files here, or get the image version here.
And a big happy birthday to my first daughter Anna, who came into the world today!!! A future maker? Engineer? Who knows, but I can tell you this, She. Is. Awesome.
😀