Preface SR (switched reluctance) motors are pretty amazing things. Originally developed in 1838, an SR motor uses some of the simplest principles of electromagnetics – energize a coil to create a magnetic field and magnetically permeable materials (i.e. some steels, nickel, iron, cobalt etc) will be attracted to it, similar to how a standard solenoid […]
The robot so aptly named MechaCrab. This is my first attempt at a 2 DOF/appendage soft robotic quadruped. I’ve been mulling this idea over for a while as it came out of my initial designs of TAMI (I will get back to that project at some point…). The idea is to use 2 DOF soft […]
Preface I’m currently doing a project that uses a tiny SSD1306 based OLED display. I’ve searched all over the internet but couldn’t actually find any data on current measurements done by people so I thought I’d do a couple and put them up here! The OLED I’m using is a standard 128×64 pixel version that […]
Long time no post! Now that’s out of the way… As ever, I’m always on the search for cheap electronics and this board is nearly mind blowing given both the price and form factor you can get it in. Enter the Gnarly Grey UPDuino v2.0 based on a Lattice iCE40UP5K FPGA featuring: 120Kbits of BRAM […]
Its been a ton of time since I last did any updates on the ol’ human sized hexapod! I finally decided to go for dedicated motor controller ICs (Allegro A4950) as opposed to a discrete solution. These chips were pretty expensive (~£27 for the entire board…) driven by an STM32F030 once again generating software PWM. […]
I’ve previously got the STM32F0 discovery board working with a FIFO (AL422b) version of the OV7670, not a particularly hard feat and many others have achieved this across the internet. From what I can find however, nobody has managed to interface an OV7670 with an STM32F0 without external memory or a FIFO! Today however, thats all […]
A couple of people requested the pinout that I’ve used for my board, I’ve uploaded this below. Cyclone4 FPGA Boardschematic_v200
In my last post, I was talking about image compression methods, mainly DCT transform based along with colour transform based. I’ve now combined these together and have managed to break the 6fps barrier for video over UART! I’ve implemented 2:1:1, 4:1:1 and 8:1:1 subsampling (I think I can call it that?) with reasonable performance! The […]
Image compression is a massive topic and to be honest, a bit of a buzzword title. Images can be compressed in multiple ways. One of the simplest being reducing the bit depth of the image. Reducing the bit depth is a pretty poor method of compression though and generally produces weird banding results as could […]
As of yesterday, I’ve got a new laptop (woop woop I7-7700HQ)! Obviously that meant transferring data over though a bit of WiFi and an overnight transfer deemed me ready to rock this morning. I do however have an exam in a week which I should probably start revising for so this will be my last […]
