After my semi successful prototype of my remote control car speedometer project using a reed switch, I’m back with version 2, this time using a hall effect sensor.
March 29, 2009
March 23, 2009
Stripboard Arduino & SD Card
I love my Arduino development board and have done some interesting experiments with it, and now I am at the stage of wanting to make some of my circuits a bit more independent and permanent, mainly so I can continue to use development board for tinkering with while leaving my other projects in a working state. The mind, body and soul of the Arduino is the ATmega168 chip, which contains all the memory, processor, analogue to digital converters and pretty much everything else. As these chips can be picked up for only a couple of pounds I thought I would have a go at making a stand alone unit to log data to an SD card…
March 9, 2009
Laser Show Prototype
I’ve recently acquired a laser pen, and of course, instantly dismantled it! I bypassed the push button and soldered on a couple of wines replacing the batteries, allowing it to be powered and controlled by the Arduino.
March 7, 2009
Transistor h-bridge VS driver IC chip (L293D)
As mentioned in an earlier post, I suggested the motor driver IC would be preferable over four transistors and lots of wire due to it’s small and neat package! However I have just realised something that may sway me in the other direction…
February 26, 2009
Hall Effect and Motor Driver Interference
My motor driver IC (L293D) arrived the other day, and before I put it to real use I thought I would just have a quick go at driving two motors at once…
February 17, 2009
Hall effect controlled CDROM draw
The next thing I wanted to try doing with my Aruino was driving some motors. I have got loads of old CD/DVD drives that I don’t use any more and thought this would be an ideal source of motors.
The motor on its own worked reasonably well connected straight between an output pin and ground, however it wasn’t particularly powerful as the output pin can only source a limited current, and I could also only turn it in one direction, without physically swapping the cables over. After a bit of research and discovered what was required to control the DC motor in both directions, and this is called a h-bridge.
February 9, 2009
Remote control car speedometer
For my next project, and this is one I have been wanting to do for while, I will be makeing a speedometer for my remote control car.
“What good is that?” I hear you say, “how are you going to read the speed when it’s going past you at 30 miles per hour!?”
February 5, 2009
SD card and Arduino
So, I have not long had my Arduino development board, my first project was to try and get it to log data to an SD card. This will be essential for a few future projects I have in mind. The internal EEPROM is only 512bytes, so not particularly useful for logging large amounts of data.