Making a corn maze
Have you seen one of those corn mazes? Some are really amazing achievements in both geometry and amount of corn destruction. So, here is how it is done!
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Reprogramming Remote Car Key
November 5th, 2010 by admin No comments »
One key - two cars; or maybe it's two keys - one car?
Now, this is something I never knew existed – it turns out it is quite possible to use the same wireless car key on multiple cars and to reprogram the key assignment and lock/unlock more than one car with a single key (or do the opposite – reassign several keys to the same car). If this works – I haven’t tested it yet – this can come up really handy.
BTW, I suspect the title is not very accurate – from the description it looks to me that what is being reprogrammed is not the key itself, but the car to recognize the key.
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Simple DIY Battery Tester
November 3rd, 2010 by admin No comments »
Battery Tester
Almost everywhere I go I have my Garmin GPS with me – hiking, biking, or just driving around. And this thing eat batteries, so I use a lot of rechargeable ones. Recently I got really tired of my attempts to keep track of which battery is full and which needs recharging, and which one doesn’t hold charge well and needs recycling, so I came up with this very simple battery tester.
It is nothing special, but it takes just a few hours to build and works just fine.
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RFID Hacks
November 1st, 2010 by admin No comments »
RFID Cards
Purely by accident I found a very interesting RFID hacking site. Even if you don’t plant on building any of the devices on the site, the information there is pretty interesting. You can find details on how to build a proximity card reader & cloner, a card spoofer and “Wiegand converter” (something that I did not have a clue that it exists) and what not.
[ Go to website ]
Reliable wireless microcontroller communication
November 1st, 2010 by admin No comments »
315MHz and 415MHz transmitters and receivers
As you probably know, there are some pretty cheap RF transmitters and receivers around. For something like $10 you can get a transmitter/receiver pair and get one-way communication link going.
With most RF projects like that you will need to implement some level of error correction. In most cases a simple checksum is enough, but there are situations where it is necessary to implement a full reliable wireless communication protocol guaranteeing that the message is transmitted properly.
This Arduino project utilises a couple of the aforementioned cheap RF transmitters and receivers, establishing a two-way link on different frequencies and describes the synchronization protocol.
[ Project ]
PIC Microcontrollers: Multibyte math code generator for 8-bit PIC microcontrollers
October 27th, 2010 by admin No comments »
PIC Math
That last post (about the pulse-width modulation code generator) reminded me that I have another PIC mocrocontroller code generator to write about. This one is for creating a customized multibyte arithmetic library. The library lets you add, subtract, multiply, divide, find modulus (remainder from division), compare, increase/decrease by one, and roll multibyte numbers – all in assembly language. Just specify the precision (number of bytes), select only those operations that you need, and press a button to get the assembly code. Comes handly for a number of projects.
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PIC PWM Calculator & Code Generator
October 27th, 2010 by admin No comments »
PWM code calculator
Unless I’m missing something, this is not exactly a “code generator” despite what the site’s title claims. The C code is there, already generated, and the calculator generates some values for some registers based on the user’s input for the microcontroller clock frequency, desired PWM frequency, and PWM duty cycle. Generator or not, can still be quite useful.
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Microcontroller Ethernet interface
October 25th, 2010 by admin No comments »
Microcontroller - Ethernet interface card
When I post to this blog I try to alternate my posts – one post about something practical, another one for something cool (even if not particularly useful). It’s time for the practical post, so here comes the Ethernet Arduino compatible controller board. It’s a neat, relatively simple, and quite useful little gadget that can be used to bridge that gap that always bothers me – how to get the computer and microcontroller to talk to each other? The good thing is you can just pull a network cable to the board and you can connect from anywhere on your home network, or even anywhere on the world. With some tweaking I believe the project can be made to use Microchip PIC microcontroller too.
(Well, the easiest option for me is still the good old RS-232 interface, but with RS-232 you are pretty limited as to what is the maximum distance between your project and the computer.)
[ Go to project ]
PARIS
October 21st, 2010 by admin No comments »
PARIS
If you are not following TheRegister’s PARIS mission, now is the time to start because the launch date is nearing fast. PARIS stands for Paper Aircraft Released Into Space and is the ultimate DIY project.
As described on The Register’s site, PARIS is high-altitude ballooning project, aiming to reach new heights in paper-based aeronautical technology. The mission consists of the main payload (with video + still-image cameras and GPS tracker) that will release Vulture 1 – small plane constructed almost entirely from paper. Vulture 1 contains a miniature still-image camera and GPS tracker that sends updates via the GSM network.
You can review the mission summary here (PDF) and follow the latest developments in the dedicated PARIS section of TheRegister.
Wallpaper – 1947 Chevrolet Truck, Blender 3D Model
October 20th, 2010 by admin No comments »
1947 Chevrolet Blender model
While doing some cleanup on my old PC I discovered some Blender 3D models that I’ve been working on few years back. One of them – a model of a 1947 Chevy pickup truck toy – may make a nice desktop wallpaper. Here are links to the rendered model in different resolutions:
1920×1200, 1920×1080, 1600×1200, 1600×1024, 1440×1024, 1280×1024, 1280×768, 1024×768, 800×600.
In addition, if you want to edit and/or render the model itself, you can download the .blend file here.
