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…
March 7, 2009
March 6, 2009
Convert to Plain Text (With HTML Entities)
I work a lot with user submitted data, and it usually comes in the form of a Microsoft Word document, either as a .doc or copied and pasted from Word into forms or emails. The problem is Microsoft Word likes to change some of the characters in your document to smart characters, most noticeably the double quotation marks, apostrophes, elongated hyphens and triple dots. Although this possibly makes the document look nicer (does it?), it is most annoying as it does not display properly in HTML, resulting in funny question marks and random characters.
I have created this simple form to strip out all of the Microsoft Word smart quotes and other weird or invisible characters that show up wrong in HTML, and replace them with the standard ASCII equivalents. At the same time you can also optionally encode the HTML entities. The results can be displayed or downloaded.
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 23, 2009
Eyebrow Mishap
A couple of months ago I had a bit of an accident when cycling home from the pub, I thought it would be clever to cycle straight over a roundabout. Unfortunately my face was abruptly stopped by the pavement. Here are the results…
Warning: Don’t like blood? Don’t look 
(more…)
Hack-a-mouse!
My mates mouse stopped working the other day, so I thought I would have a go at fixing it, assuming it was probably a damaged cable as is usually the case. After checking the continuity of the cable we decided this wasn’t the problem. So I had the mouse apart and started poking around looking for bad connections or damaged components, and discovered something pretty weird.
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.
February 1, 2009
Modified ATX PSU
In anticipation of my Arduino development board arriving, I decided I will definitely need a decent power supply. I have loads of old adapters laying around from phones, routers and other old devices, but these are usually quite low voltage and current. I wanted something with a bit more juice, something with some nice high voltages that could really pack a load!
November 23, 2008
Explode into associative array
Simple function to explode a string into an associative array. Works in the same way as the normal explode but takes an extra argument which is an array of keys to use for the returned associative array.