The ECE 4760 Final Projects are here! Check out this DIY Digital Saxophone that was designed by Brian Wang. His design uses an omni directional microphone that is mounted in a tube to reduce background noise. The player blows into the tube and the microphone pics up the wind noise to know when the player is blowing. This signal is amplified and fed into a microcontroller. Buttons are positioned on the body just like a real Saxophone has and while the player is blowing pressing different key combinations allows for different notes to be played.

If you need to control some motors wirelessly this Wireless Motor Controller project by PyroElectro might be just the thing to get you kickstarted. The project uses SN754410NE chip to drive the motor and a XBee module to make the project wireless.

“The purpose of this project is to build a system that can independently and wirelessly control two DC motors. To do this, the system will need 4 core components: an input system for the transmitter, a wireless transmitter, a wireless receiver, and a motor controller connected to the receiver.”

The video above demonstrates what Vijay Kumar and his team are building. We have seen some toy quadcopters that have some impressive capabilities but I can’t wait till a tiny and smart quadcopter as agile as these are available. If you don’t have the time to watch the entire video make sure you see the flight demonstrations at 10:05.

Thanks for sending this in Matt.

 ”In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams — for construction, surveying disasters and far more.”

PyroElectro highlights this attention-grabbing PIC 18F4450 based Line Following Robot project by some university students. The main purpose of this embedded system is to follow a line. You can also refer with the description below if you want to pick the idea for your academic projects.

Via: PyroElectro

“This was a second-year Embedded Systems Application Project at university. We were given the hardware and after assembling the robot, had to write firmware for it. The PIC MCU programming was done in C. As it was the first time this course was run, objectives were not concrete and were updated as students progressed. Some of the objectives were: follow a line, go over a ramp and memorize a track.”

Windell H. Oskay from EMSL created a detailed discussion on using Zener Diodes. He has designed a circuit flow using Zener diodes to control the reverse breakdown while designing up a circuit which is impossible to do if he would had used a regular diode.

“Zener diodes are a special type of semiconductor diode– devices that allow current to flow in one direction only –that also allow current to flow in the opposite direction, but only when exposed to enough voltage. And while that sounds a bit esoteric, they’re actually among the handiest components ever to cross an engineer’s bench, providing great solutions to a number of common needs in circuit design. “

If you have a junk box full of all sorts of motors from printers, scanners and other discarded tech you need to know what you have so you can use it in your next project. Thanks to Steaky for sending in this info that was written to help you determine what type of stepper motor you have and how to use it.

“Not only do stepper motors come in a variety of shapes and sizes, they also have different coil configurations. This can help identify how to drive the stepper motor, and what sort of controller you are likely to need to drive the motor. Stepper motors typically have 4,5,6 or 8 wires, and these can be used to identify the type of motor. There are two types of stepper; Unipolar and Bipolar. This refers to how each coil is driven. A unipolar stepper only requires each coil to be driven in one direction, whereas a bipolar requires driving in both directions.”

There are lots of surface mount parts out there that aren’t available in DIP format. Normal DIP format chips and various other parts have pins that are configured with a 0.1 inch spacing. Breadboards make prototyping a circuit fast and easy since there is no soldering involved, it is literally plug and play. If the connections need to be changed all you do is pull the wiring out and position it where you would like it.

But what happens when your part is not in a 0.1 inch format? There are lots of pin converters from companies like Spark Fun that allow you to solder surface mount parts to them and they have the popular 0.1 inch pins so that you can now simply plug it into your breadboard.

But what happens when you have a very strange high pitch connector that you would like to connect to your bread board? Per Jensen from Zapro shows us his solution here, he had a bunch of LCDs with a fine pitch ribbon cable that he wanted to use with his projects. Some very fine wire, a soldering iron with a pointy tip and nerves of steel is all that is needed to bridge between the flex cable and the breadboard pluggable pins. Since this fine wire could break with just the slightest movement, the most important thing to do is isolate the new fragile connections. Per uses some hot glue to stabilize the entire convertor so that it can be handled without the worry of the wires breaking, only issue here is you better be sure that you have it wired up exactly as you want it because unlike solder hot glue is hard to reverse.