Continuing with its endeavor to deliver low cost micro controller hardware development platform, NGX has now launched a new low cost prototyping platform for LPC1768 series of mircocontrollers. LPC1700 are ARM cortex-M3 based micro controllers. The platform is named BlueBoard-LPC1768-H and costs only $32.5

BlueBoard-LPC1768-H is a breakout board for LPC1768 cortex-M3 based microcontroller. The LPC1768 microcontroller has 512KB of internal flash and 64KB RAM. Ethernet MAC, USB Device/Host/OTG interface, 8-channel general purpose DMA controller, 4 UARTs, 2 CAN channels, 2 SSP controllers, SPI interface, 3 I2C-bus interfaces, 2-input plus 2-output I2S-bus interface, 8-channel 12-bit ADC, 10-bit DAC, motor control PWM, Quadrature Encoder interface, 4 general purpose timers, 6-output general purpose PWM, ultra-low power Real-Time Clock (RTC) with separate battery supply, and up to 70 general purpose I/O pins

Board can be purchased from
http://shop.ngxtechnologies.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=65

Following are the salient features of the board.
* Dimensions: 94.08×54.48 mm2
* Two layer PCB (FR-4 material)
* Power: USB powered or can be powered through the DC jack, 5-7.5V input
* reset switch
* Test LED
* 32Khz crystal for RTC
* On board 258kb I2C EERPOM
* Extension headers for all microcontroller pins
* USB B-type connector for powering the board
* 20pin – JTAG connector

Are you feeling tired of paying large electric bills? Probably you feel that some tweaking in home electric system would save couple bucks. So why not to try, but for this you will probably need a power level monitor to determine where are biggest usage of electric. Building power level monitor can be quite easy – there can any microcontroller be used for this. In this case a LPC2138 ARM7 microcontroller has been chosen which, I think, probably is too powerful for such simple task.

The simple idea of design is to sense current and step down voltage to level acceptable to MCU IO ports. The current sensor is made of transformer with some modifications. Device detects zero crossings of voltage and current in order to determine the phase shifts so it could calculate power RMS correctly. Power level information can be viewed in two ways – via 7 segment LED indicator mounted directly on device or it can be sent via USART to monitor it computer screen and probably so some statistics. The full project can be downloaded here.

When dealing with signals probably the best way is to leave the task for DSP processor as they are optimized to do DSP calculations like FFT, filtering and other digital signal manipulation. But not always a DSP processor is an only solution especially if you want a low cost and non critical performance application like audio spectrum analyzer. In this project an ARM7 (LPC2138) microcontroller is used to do a FFT algorithm.

The tricky part about FFT on such microcontrollers is dealing with complex numbers that are also real. The project description shows whole process how these problems are solved. Project is set up on ZL6ARM prototype board, which is equipped with all necessary peripherals like LCD, MAX232 converter. Program is developed under ARM-GCC compiler. Audio signal is sampled by LPC2138 internal ADC with sampling frequency of 40 kHz. FFT algorithm calculates the chunks of 256 samples and produces the graphs on PC screen. This is a great project and nice tutorial to get in to DSP world.

Are you always having trouble of weighing your weight, especially when you’re on the bathroom? If this problem has been bothering you for a very long time, then this smart SD card bathroom scale would be the best solution for you!

For today’s project, we’re going to learn on how to hack a digital bathroom scale, so that you can write (log) your weight variations over time on a memory SD card. It might sound a little bit complicated here, but honestly, it wasn’t as hard as you thought in the first place.

Basically, the theory is very simple and work perfectly for everyone. If you would like to have the bathroom scale sending by wireless the weight values, then you should apply a display console (running embedded GNU/linux) and attach it to bathroom wall. The wireless signal would be received and a graph will be shown to the user with last values of the last two weeks. As a result, it’s a best method to let the user have a clear picture about their weight progression from time to time.

By the way, the display console is able to store the time date and weight values on a memory SD card too!

Most of the time, we’re have been experiencing this awful situation before. Go figure, how many times you’ve tried to adjust something for level with a spanner, but you’re not able to see how you doing!

Furthermore, things start to out of control, if you are handling a pool table that has four adjustable feet, which you can fiddling around with the spanner and trying to figure out what is the exact table level is! Yeah, the whole scene could turn into a really nasty and huge pain for the fixer…

However, there’s better solution for the above matter. Let’s meet the Mr. Incredible, Dual-Axis Level Sensor (Oops, is it really a person?).

Basically, the dual-axis level sensor is based on LPC2138 microcontroller. Even though the designation is quite simple and unattractive, but it provides exceptional convenience to the users!

For your information, the sensor system is fully-designed around electrolytic tilt sensors, where is capable of providing precise positioning measurements in within a few seconds!

The units form the basis for many other applications. The Dual-axis level sensor is including with self-leveling platform, builder level, pinball, pool table leveling and other industrial applications. Hence, it’s suitable for being used, not only at home but in the industry sectors as well!