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 […]
After the faults with controller board 1, I wanted to respin another controller board ASAP. These boards arrived yesterday and with a swift order from RS, so did a load of components! On the previous board, I was using a large STM32 device with many pins and driving the motors directly through level shifter chips. […]
It’s certainly been a while since I wrote a tutorial, a lot of the STM32 ecosystem has changed and its probably time I changed with it. CubeMX was developed by ST to streamline application design and creation. It allows for a visual method of generating initialization code without needing to know the ins and outs […]
Robots! Who doesn’t like robots… I’ve never to day done any projects in robots now while I find them cool, the reasoning for which is they’re generally pretty expensive. Therefore, I’ve decided to try and design the smallest most functional micro robot that I can. One of my main aims was to be able to […]
To ensure LEDs have a long life span, the brightness and power dissipation can be controlled by a constant current source. Dedicated ICs are available for this task though having already designed a buck converter with the PIC10, I thought I’d have a go at extending this to controlling the current through an LED. The […]
It has certainly been a stressful Christmas, 5 exams feels so much more than 4! I feel the extra exam is just a spanner in my revision works but hey! Medics get it a ton worse so how can I complain. I’ve had quite a few requests with the MAX7219 8×8 matrix display, namely a […]
4×4 Font Well! With the advent of multiple new LCDs to test out, I decided to challenge myself to designing a 4×4 font, a pretty grim task if I’m honest. A 4×4 font with good byte packing could store the whole font set from character 32 to character 127 in 190 bytes. Note that for […]
Wahooooo! Exams are over, term starts next week and I’m free other than a few nights out with me chums over the next few days. In the meantime, today brought the arrival of my first ever DSO (Hantek DSO5072P) and a new LCD (the other LCD came a couple of days back but that comes […]
With my final exam looming over the next two days, on power supply electronics, I decided to actually apply the knowledge I learnt for once to design a COMPLETELY makeshift boost converter for a high power LED I’d purchased previously (http://goo.gl/zFooZK – Link will expire!). I don’t really see the use for me to have […]
Well today has been productive! Here, I’m using my cheapo MAX7219 LED screen (cheaply available off my favourite website eBay: http://goo.gl/NBURFm, link will expire!) to create a scrolling text effect! The font used is from my standard graphics library, originally from the Adafruit graphics library. I’ve modified the text size from 5×8 to 6×8 in the […]
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