The artists from artsdesignblog.com found a nice and exotic use for the electronic components. Indeed a very creative use, and as an engineer in electronics myself, those remind of the increasing similarity between the machines and the living beings !
If you need a temperature sensor but don’t have one at hand, here’s an easy way to create one, using a .. diode ! All what you have to do is to bias the diode with a current around 1 mA, and to measure it’s forward voltage drop.
The forward voltage of a silicon diode varies with about -2 mV / °C. So, basically the diode itself can be used as a temperature sensor. In order to have a good precision, you should perform a calibration by measuring the output voltage at a known temperature. Continue reading
The Bulgarian manufacturer Olimex has just released an open source low cost single board computer based on i.MX233 integrated circuit from Freescale.This board features a powerful ARM926J core running at 454 MHz, 64 MB RAM, one high speed USB host port, and even a PAL / NTSC video output. This board is able to run Linux from the SD card bringing you a powerful system at the cost of an 8-bit microcontroller development board. Continue reading
MSP430 Launchpad from Texas Instruments is one of the cheapest microcontroller development boards (4.30 $), but it was lacking a free IDE (I mean free as in freedom, not as in free beer). Now there is Energia, an Arduino-like IDE for MSP430 Launchpad, which makes it easy to get started, no matter the technical level of the user.
What would you say about 25$ single board computer ? Now it has become a reality with Raspberry Pi, a low ARM GNU/Linux box.
It has a quite impressive set of features considering its price. It’s based on BCM2835 SoC which contains a 700 MHz ARM processor and a Videocore 4 GPU capable of HD video Continue reading