YourITronics

The past few months I’ve been working on the project for the Digilent Design Contest so I was quite busy. Together with my colleague Dragos I worked allot on this project but the results were great, our project the BlueRover won the 1st place so I say it was well worth it. First of all Digilent provided most of the parts needed for the project like :

• 1 x Cerebot 32MX4 dev board
• 4 x dc motors
• 4 x HB5 motor drivers
• wheels, metal pieces to put everything together

Besides these we also used:

• 1 x LiPo 2S battery
• 1 x 5V dc to dc converter
• 1 x 6v dc to dc converter
• 1 x BTM222 bluetooth module
• 1 x MQ6 LPG gas sensor
• 1 x MQ7 CO sensor
• 1 x TMP275 digital temperature sensor
• 1 x MMA7455 digital 3 axis accelerometer

The idea of a remote controlled rover excites almost every electronics student and when we heard about the Digilent contest we realized that we have the possibility to make such a project real. We decided to build our own remote controlled rover but it had to be different from what we’ve seen before. We came up with the idea that we could control the rover by using accelerometer data and that we could use a second accelerometer placed on the rover to sense the driving surface.

I handled the Rover with the sensors and my colleague took care of the control unit which is a Nokia E55 smartphone running a custom application in Python. The principle is simple the control unit sends acceleration data to the rover every 100ms thus controlling the movement of the rover. The rover reads data from the on-board sensors (CO, LPG, Temperature, Accelerometer, and Battery) and sends it to the control unit every 100ms. The control unit receives sensor data from the rover and reacts according to the rover accelerometer by vibrating on each bump sensed by the accelerometer. At the same time the control unit displays sensor data on screen.

I’m not going to go into details about the source code or the specs of all the boards we used in this project but you can find those in our report which I’m linking at the end of this article. I would like to add that Digilent RO did a great job in organizing this contest, it was a really great experience to be there and I’m sure we’ll be there next year too.

You can watch photos from the contest here: http://picasaweb.google.com/digilen.ro

Now I’ll leave you with a demo of our project captured right at the contest presentation:

Downloads:

• BlueRover documentation
• Rover source code (written in C in MPLAB)
• Control unit application source code (written in Python)

This article will be followed up by one dedicated to the BTM180 and BTM222 bluetooth modules from Rayson. Due to the lack of documentation on this module it was really difficult to get them working and I would like to share my experience for those who are facing the same issues.

Sparkfun has a really interesting article about some ATmega328 from China which proved to be slugs . This all started back in December of 2009 with the “global crisis” of ATmega328 in both DIP and surface mount packages. To avoid getting out of stock Sparkfun ordered these from a supplier in China which until then they only used for passives. When they got the chips and started testing they noticed the chips were not working at all hence the slug name. You can read about the visual differences between chips and how they used an acid bath to look under the hood. This is a very good lesson about getting stuff like microcontrollers from Chinese suppliers, you just can’t trust them. I was very close at the beginning of this year to making the same mistake. I was attracted by the lower price per large quantity, but I realized that its just not worth it to risk and get some fake chips.

5000 Free STM8S-Discovery Kits, this is the way STM is trying to get loud about the upcoming embedded world 2010 in Nuremberg.

The STM8S-Discovery is a quick-start evaluation board based on the STM8S105C6T6. It includes the embedded debugger ST-LINK and one touch-sensing button which help you to discover the STM8 features.

I find this a very attractive idea and it’s not about the value of a product(the STM8S-Discovery is under $10) but people coming to visit the embedded world and people in general are going to be happy to get something for free especially when that something is a dev board. I have a soft spot for dev boards, I like them and I wouldn’t mind getting one for free. Even though a certain board might not end up being used every day I will certainly power it up and try some code on it. That being said, I would love to register & visit the embedded world 2010 but I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to be there March 2 to 4.

you can read more about it here , there also a voucher code that you can use to get a free ticket.

Miguel writes :

The analyzer has become my best travel companion. It’s very discrete: everyone think you are playing with a mobile phone!. You can see in a moment what are the used frecuencies / channels at your location. One of the most interesting things if to carry it in the pocket in exposure mode and walk sometime in your neighborhood. In this way you can find easily what are the free frecuencies or channels. With the time, I learned how to distinguish between different device

Mobile 2.4 GHz Spectrum Analyzer: [via HackADay]

You may recall, almost a year ago we did a review of Protostack’s ATmega8 development kit. You can read the original review here. Well it turns out that they have been busily churning out new versions of this board, with version 1.4 being released, just the other week. This version has got many improvements over the one we reviewed. Some of the recent improvements include a power supply block for L7805 and the like, a 2×3 pin ISP port and a section for dual row headers or IDC connectors. The board still retains the same great features that we saw in version 1, like the large breadboard style prototyping area and the power busses that are routed throughout. It is available by itself or as part of an ATmega8 or ATMega168 development kit. With both kits being under $20 and the board itself under $10, it is still quite affordable.