Arduino has strong positions in hobby market. Their strategy is really simple – everything works out of a box. Speaking of development boards – they are open source with unified pin layout that allow plugging multiple extension (shield) boards. Development software is also open, works on major platforms including Windows, Linux and MacOSX. But probably the winning factor is that arduino is rich in libraries allowing easy code writing without knowing whats going on inside chip.

Original Arduino boards are based on Atmel AVR 8-bit microcontrollers that are limited in processing power and even more in Flash and SRAM . Additionally Arduino libraries are written to be easy usable with sacrifice of performance. If you tried to develop more time critical apps then you know that Arduino’s don’t shine in this position. You can work around by writing your own libraries or simply go non Arduino way – writing your own C code. But why loose ability to use libraries and rich community resoures only because hardware can’t ensure desired performance.

This is where chipKIT comes in. Thanks to Newark we are able to take a closer look at chipKIT Uno32 which promises Arduino like experience with higher performance. Read more »

For their final project, a group of students at cornell university decited to make a smart voice decoder for vowels – this basically acquires samples of your voice, do the wave math and determines which vowels are being spoken.

The input is captured using a microphone through an amplifier circuit. Voice data is analyzed in real time (ill say it again REAL TIME) using a Mega644 microcontroller – it has both hardware and soft ware intrefaces that would trigger the analysis – the user could use a button (yellow) or could enter a command in PuTTY.

As an application of their methods they also built a simple voice password system. Where the only way to gain access (unlock) is to correctly utter a sequence of vowels at the correct order. I really like this project specially that it touches the topics of  Fast Walsh Transform, sampling theorems and human speech analysis. We are waiting for the version 2 of this to come out, come on people add the consonants ide like to try “Open Sesame” on our house!

There are several implementations of tree climbing robots out there (still climbing trees?)

Technochiken – a new Arduino fan wants to test his newly acquired skills in programming microcontrollers……..(the dots represent the time he spent searching on the net) He finally decide to build a tree climbing robot using the Arduino as the the main controller that would facilitate the climbing motion of the robot. He starter the build process with a sketch of the mechanical parts – its better to have a plan to avoid wasting materials.

The robot is mainly composed of aluminum – the frame, the claws (the legs) and it has a central shaft that it used to create the climbing displacement. The claws and the central shaft is powered by DC motors which in turn are driven through an L298 H-Bridge Motor Driver. One unique thing about this climber is the fact that it senses the gripping of the tree by determining the speed of the motors – the motor’s speed goes down when the gripping action touches the tree – talk about neatly designed robots.

When I was trying to search for cheap AVR programmers on eBay i came across a bunch of AVRASP programmers from China, they cost a lot cheaper compared to their premium counterparts, it was a surprise to know that when they arrived that these programmers (or hex loaders as I call them) are made using an ATmega8! I was astonished to learn that a microcontrollor is programming another microcotroller – something like recursive programming.

A cool dude that goes by the name of  jethomson had a brilliant idea of actually modifying the AVRASP programmer so that it would become an ATmega8 development board ready to take in code – he even made it compatible and programmable with the famous Arduino Environment. All that was needed to complete the transformation was a little soldering job, a push button, wires and an external programmer, that was for the hardware side for the software he played with the AVR fuses and added a few lines to the boards.txt file.

To demonstrate his work, he modified the USB Business Card to output  “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.