A few years ago it was expensive and almost impossible to manufacture custom mechanical parts at home. Recently we have seen the rise of the low cost 3D printers (usually under 1000 $), allowing you to have your own factory at home.
In the last period, the software defined radio starts to become more and more popular, due to it’s obvious advantages over the analog radio. With SDR, basically you can do almost everything, no matter how complicated the modulation and demodulation techniques are used.
This concept is not new, but the high performance electronics available for low prices have rendered practical many things. Now, it costs only 20$ ! Continue reading
Recently I saw the LOL Shield .. an Arduino Shield with lots of LEDs. This shield uses chalieplexing, a technique which allows you to drive a big LED matrix with a small number of I/O pins. If you’re wondering how does it work, here’s the key concept: tri-state logic.
I have been very amazed by the STM32 microcontrollers from ST Microelectronics, which feature a 32 bit ARM core and all kinds of peripherals (12 bit A/D converters capable of a few MSPS, 12 bit D/A converters, 32 bit timers, I2C, SPI, CAN, UART, USB, Ethernet MAC, etc.). Continue reading