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Back in May I wrote about a low cost radiation detector I was prototyping for the OpenRelief project. Based on a simple ionisation chamber, initial testing used a bank of batteries for the bias power supply and this post details the construction of an inverter to replace these.
A major highlight of a week of activity at the Sci-Fi London festival was the Horizon Spectrum event at the BFI Southbank celebrating 30 years of the Sinclair Spectrum 'home' computer. I attended the
Developments in recent years suggest that we may be on the cusp of an engineering renaissance. Significant advances are being made in key areas such as tools, technology, principles and methodologies,
A comparison of the respective benefits of the low cost embedded development platforms that may help with making a decision as to which to use when.
If you are not familiar with Arduino, it is an OpenSource hardware platform for electronics projects, tinkering, robotics, home automation etc etc etc. The blue board above is the heart of it.
A movement is gathering steam in electronics engineering. Similar to the opensource soft ware movement that has opened up access to a wide range of IT applications, open-source hardware is helping t
A first look at the upcoming modular expansion system for Raspberry Pi.
The OpenRelief project is building “open, modular information solutions for disaster relief”, and as part of which they're developing a range of network-enabled sensors. I offered to help out by p
I've been playing with a browser plug in called Seriality , to quote the project websiteSeriality is a serial connectivity browser plug-in that enables web pages to communicate with microcontrollers
So there are lots of development boards out now. And since the introduction of the Arduino there are lots of clones around too which is good in my view. So this is what I have to say is the smallest d
An extract from an article in Etech issue 9 by Dr William Marshal, Twiiter @WilliamMarshal1The competition for hearts and minds in the opensource embedded development community continues apace with mi
I’ve noticed an interesting trend recently. Forgive my lack of awareness if this has all been said before, but here it is: microcontroller chip manufacturers are making/supporting some very cheap development kits nowadays.
John Boxall (or tronixstuff as he is known on the community) is an Arduino specialist and blogger from Toowong, Australia with a passion for education and all things technical. John's blog is a
A huge thanks to all that attended Saturday's Arduino DevCamp, not least to the Arduino Team who gave a fantastic Q&A session on Arduino in general and the use of Arduino in education.Over the nex
A small selection of personal highlights from over the last 12 months.
There are many ways in which devices can talk to each other. There is good old RS232 or use TTL serial RX/TX, or SPI and even parallel communications. However when I started on a project nearly t
For anyone wishing to take their first steps into electronics design, things have never been easier. Technologies such as Arduino, mbed and TI's LaunchPad have made serious engineering accessibl
There can’t be many people who don't know about the ARM mbed. This has been right up there with the Arduino as the standard for development boards for some time now. However over the last year we ha
Taking, adapting and creating new electronics hardware designs just got a whole lot easier. I look at how the free pcb design tool from RS Components, DesignSpark PCB, is helping to lower barriers to
Some eight months ago I had a play with the chipKIT MAX32. At the time I was not over impressed by lack of full Arduino compatibility but since then Digilent have now released the Ethernet board. As w
Many of us sit and complain about how well products work, point out there issues and bad point but few spend time doing something about it. In this review I look at just such a product, designed by en
An Internet connection would be a valuable addition to many projects, but often designers are put off by the complexities involved. The ‘NetWorker’, which consists of a small printed circuit board
Renesas have produced a whole new range of chips, the RL78’s. A new range of low power high performance microcontrollers. Last week I got my hands on the RL78/G13 promotion board to give it a test run - so lets see how good it is!
Sometimes you can get excited about a Dev Kit before you even switch it on, but can the Leaflabs Maple Board live up to my exportation's or will this just be another STM32 fail? So this last few weeks
Last month Nat Morris built a Twitter-controlled feeder for his dog, Toby. In the first five days of this being online it was being used by a group consisting of friends and family. But after national
Modern applications require quite a bit of analog and digital capabilities. Most of the medium level systems now employ microcontrollers, ADCs and DACs. For a normal design engineer, the practic
There are different ways for a system to interact with the real world. Starting with the use of a simple LED that describes the state of a process and going all the way down to complicated graphic LCD
Among the low cost FPGA development tools sits one name that we are all familiar with. FTDI who are well known for their range of interface chips, from USB to just about anything they are true a leade
In the video below, Filear has created an audio sensor network with the help of an Arduino microcontroller that does the necessary comparisons between the sensors to determine the direction of sound.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be testing out the Arduino and RS Components EDP as possible hardware and software development platforms for us mainstream engineers. I’ll be looking at them also form
A few months ago DesignSpark had a brief review of the APC or Android Personal Computer, seen as a possible rival to the Raspberry Pi. I say possible, because despite a flashy website proclaiming the arrival of a ‘$49 Bicycle for the Mind’, it seemed remarkably difficult to get hold of. Things have moved quickly and RS is now the European distributer for the APC and has it in stock. Is it a ‘Pi-Killer’ though?
Do you like making things?Do you like fish and chips?Can you get to Brighton (UK) on the 8th of september 2012?If the answer to any of the above is yes, you might be interested in Brighton Mini Maker
With 2011 well under way I thought I'd share with you (in no particular order) my top 5 DesignSpark blog posts of 2010. Paul J. Clarke - Engineering in schools
Within the last few years the open source hardware movement has been subject to explosive growth, as hobbyists to established multi-national organisations have come to realise the inherent potential o
So, connectivity... Where would we be without it? Well, obviously some place else. But as luck would have it, we are able to communicate and we can communicate with our ICs. In fact we're having loa
The socially responsible among us wishing to save the planet from a carbon dioxide doom should quickly move on to the next blog post now, as I have a confession to make: I own and occasionally get to
Now that the Raspberry Pi has started to ship excitement has notched up a level as tweets and blog posts provide tantalising insights into early experiences with the computer.
RS hosts Microchip seminars.
Healthcare is becoming more demanding by the hour.... probably by the minute. Natural calamities and resultant man-made disasters contribute heavily to those diseases which were unheard of in the past
In Part III, we discussed about how electro-surgery is performed. However, role of microcontrollers in electro-surgery was not mentioned which we shall complete here. Microcontrollers are used in ESUs
Parallella, A Supercomputer for everyone!
This post is not about Raspberry Pi. Sorry about that; I thought I'd take a break from all that heady stuff about HD graphics and ARM processors to look at a similar sized and priced beginners' computer board, but located towards the Arduino end of the processor power spectrum. It comes as a kit of parts and you have to solder it together yourself.
As I wrote this blog Raspberry Pi exploded on the scene taking everyone by surprise with the sheer volume of people wanting to buy it. Many readers will have to wait a while to get their hands on one so why not use the time to investigate rather more interesting projects than just writing games? How about giving a humanoid walking robot some Artificial Intelligence…
What’s the difference between, FRAM, F-RAM and FeRAM?, Well it’s the same thing!, it's Ferroelectic RAM. Texas Instruments (TI) are among the first to offer a family of Microcontrollers with
This post takes a look at interfacing the novel AS3935 lightning sensor with an Arduino.
With a 300MHz to 3.8GHZ range, 40MHz bandwidth, USB 3.0 interface and priced at only $400, it's hardly surprising bladeRF reached its $100,000 Kickstarter goal in under 8 days.
A post-event report from Open Source Hardware User Group meeting No. 17.At the seventeenth OSHUG meeting we were given an introduction to the practicalities of programming your own open source system-
There was a time when deciding which microprocessor to use for a new project was pretty easy: there weren’t that many to choose from. Who remembers the Intel 8080, Motorola 6800 or the CBM 6502? The