Hi everyone,

I know this is bit late i am posting this project. Students from Florida International University Ali Alshamma, Chris Bello, Danner Fagundo submitted this project a long time back i didnt get time to upload it well its always never too late .

Here is Abstract of project taken from project report which is included with the project.

Autonomous Security Guard Robot (with project report)





I request everyone to submit their projects, this way we can spread more knowledge, exchange more ideas and thoughts with students and learners around the world.

"The More you Share, The More you learn!"

Embedded system developers are typically very skilled and knowledgeable in their field. They may be an expert in secure authentication, routing, wireless applications, etc. ? whatever is needed for their application. But typically their understanding of JTAG is minimal. This is a technology that is vital for debugging and testing an embedded application. With an appreciation of how JTAG works, the number of setup details may be minimized, which leads to an easier and faster transition to the goal of designing, developing, and differentiating a product. This paper explains the issues and concepts that require a JTAG connection and how it provides much needed visibility and control of a modern processor core-based system.

JTAG DEBUG ? EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

Enjoy!

Dave

[Submitted by DavesGarage]

check out google' s new release.

Google launched its own cell phone, a device called the Nexus One, at a press conference in Mountain View, CA, on Tuesday. Designed and built by the Taiwanese handheld-device company HTC in partnership with Google, the phone is being sold through a new online store that will sell not only Nexus One but also future devices based on Android, Google's mobile operating system. Consumers can buy the Nexus One on its own, or with a service plan on T-Mobile's network.
Voice mail: The Nexus One features the latest software for the Android operating system, including voice recognition for every text field and sophisticated 3-D graphics.
Credit: Google

Calling the device a "superphone," Mario Queiroz, a vice president of product management at Google, said the company wanted to create a phone to demonstrate "what's possible on mobile phones through the Android platform."

Stressing that the Nexus One is actually the first in a series, Andy Rubin, Google's vice president of mobile platforms, said that devices sold through Google's online store will always demonstrate "the best possible Google experience."

The Nexus One includes a one-gigahertz processor that's faster than that of most smart phones on the market today (Verizon's Droid, for example, has a 550-megahertz processor, and the iPhone's processor is estimated to be around 600 megahertz). Other hardware specifications include a 3.7-inch display, a five-megapixel camera, light and proximity sensors, and dual microphones that allow for noise cancellation.

Dear Everyone,

Wish you all "Merry Christmas" from Me (Ajay) and My Team (ExperimenterUK, DavesGarage, Arun Kumar V, pdi33, Shailesh NAYAK, ? TPS ?, shyam, sashijoseph). May santa fill your life with gifts of joy and prosperity.

Regards,
Rickey's World

Ordinary paper could one day be used as a lightweight battery to power the devices that are now enabling the printed word to be eclipsed by e-mail, e-books and online news.

Scientists at Stanford University in California reported on Monday they have successfully turned paper coated with ink made of silver and carbon nanomaterials into a "paper battery" that holds promise for new types of lightweight, high-performance energy storage.

The same feature that helps ink adhere to paper allows it to hold onto the single-walled carbon nanotubes and silver nanowire films. Earlier research found that silicon nanowires could be used to make batteries 10 times as powerful as lithium-ion batteries now used to power devices such as laplop computers.

"Taking advantage of the mature paper technology, low cost, light and high-performance energy-storage are realized by using conductive paper as current collectors and electrodes," the scientists said in research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This type of battery could be useful in powering electric or hybrid vehicles, would make electronics lighter weight and longer lasting, and might even lead someday to paper electronics, the scientists said. Battery weight and life have been an obstacle to commercial viability of electric-powered cars and trucks."Society really needs a low-cost, high-performance energy storage device, such as batteries and simple supercapacitors," Stanford assistant professor of materials science and engineering and paper co-author Yi Cui said.
Cui said in an e-mail that in addition to being useful for portable electronics and wearable electronics, "Our paper supercapacitors can be used for all kinds of applications that require instant high power."

"Since our paper batteries and supercapacitors can be very low cost, they are also good for grid-connected energy storage," he said.

Peidong Yang, professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley, said the technology could be commercialized within a short time.

[Submitted by anil4lee]

If you are thinking that old style switch matrix is not cool enough for your project, then you must take a look at this. This projects takes you to a "Touch generation" ride demonstrating a practical implementation of QMatrix technology used today for making capacitive touch sensor interface.

The basic idea behind this technology is to transfer the charge through the sensor capacitance to a tank capacitor gradually, until a charge sufficiently large to be measured builds up. After that, a current is applied to the tank capacitor and the time that it takes to reach zero crossing is measured. When sensor surface is being touched, the fingers steal part of the charge to be dissipated by the body and less of it gets transferred to the tank capacitor. This difference can be measured and tried to tell if a button is being touched or not.



As you can see keyboard runs so smooth and looks pretty cool Project is made on an ATMega8 running at 16Mhz. The firmware is completely open source along with schematics and PCB designs. Click here for more information on this project.

Many times people have asked me if its possible to make an RFID reader, I said yes but its complicated and recommend go for an RFID module instead. The complication includes not only the hardware but also the software part. The project utilizes a PIC16F628A with an on-chip comparator in order to feed the output from the op-amp directly into the PIC and extract the digital signal from an RFID card reader.



The use of PIC16F628A is for more efficient signal reading by using interrupt based compare capture module since it is provides 150kHz carrier signal generation. Changing the values of capacitance causes the frequency of the entire system to be fine tuned. This is made possible using the function generator to sweep for the peak output observed with the scope where the capacitor size is altered until the peak response of the resonance circuit is at 150kHz.

The op-amp used in the project is TL062 with a simple diode detector. The detected voltage goes through the first op-amp configured as an inverting amplifier with low pass frequency response which will remove bulk of the carrier frequency. Extracting the FSK signal is the next stage of analog circuit which is a resonant band pass circuit with a center frequency.

The capture hardware shares resources with the PWM module that generates the 150kHz carrier signal, and only one function activates at a time.

For complete information on this project Read More here

The game of life is the best example of a cellular automaton, is actually a Zero-player game, which means that its evolution is determined by the initial state and needs no further input. The dashboard game "is a grid of squares (" cells ") that extends infinitely in all directions. Each cell has 8 surrounding cells, which are those close to her, even in the end zone.
The cells have two states : they are "alive" or "dead" (or "on" and "off"). The state of the mesh evolves over discrete time units (one could say in turn). The status of all cells takes into account when calculating the state of negotiations at the next turn. All cells are updated simultaneously.

This project is build on a PIC12F683 microcontroller, Nokia 3310 LCD as display and 2x QT100A making it a low power consuming gaming device. Two capacitive sensor pads are used switches. Software is written intelligently to handle the big 84x48 lcd screen in parts of 25×71 efficiently using the small ram area.

This project you can also give a test drive on proteus. All the files and complete information you can get on the links below.

Orginal Spanish Link: Juego de la vida - Game of Life (Conway)

English translated Link: Juego de la vida - Game of Life (Conway)

You might have seen many videos around you tube showing off crazy LED cubes, forming 3-D structures etc. But haven't find anything that explains how this is being done. Well searching over internet i found this great project made using a PIC 16F688 microcontroller used to control a 5x5x5 LED matrix cube.

The LED cube is made up from 125 LEDs arranged into 5 layers of 25 LEDs each. The display itself is multiplexed so instead of requiring 125 connections it requires one to each of the five layers and 25 to each LED in a layer making a total of 30. The cube is refreshed by a software interrupt routine with each layer active for 2ms, so the entire cube is refreshed every 10mS (100Hz). This results in a display with no visible flicker.

Only 8 I/O lines are needed to control the LED drivers for the cube which allows a tiny 14 pin PIC 16F688 microcontroller to control the whole cube. This micro has an internal 8Mhz clock and 4Kwords of program memory.

The complete circuit can be download in pdf format here: schematic
Firmware Download: LED Cube Matrix Driver


You can find more interesting videos and ready to burn hex file here: LED Cube Matrix Controller