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Colin Karpfinger who you might have seen in Wired recently (and on Hacked Gadgets before) wanted to inspire the current group of students at his old College, he told them how he started out in electronics and some of the stumbles along the way. He talks about his 555 timer project where he built a beeping countdown bomb simulation on a breadboard. Unfortunately the professor wasn’t very impressed. |
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If you want to learn about microcontrollers in a classroom setting but don’t have the time (or money) to attend university lectures you are in luck. Bruce Land who teaches the popular ECE4760 Microcontrolle course has just posted the lecture videos online. This means you can get the benefit of this great Cornell course from the convenience of your own home and it will not cost you a cent. |
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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.
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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.”
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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.” 
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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.”
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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. “
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He designed it into a product that he wanted to sell but component tolerances made the newly built circuit not work correctly. He was introduced to microcontrollers which is perfect for this type of task. He also talks about a 
