This project can be useful if you are trying to point you antenna to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite. Why do it manually if you can leave this job to automatic tracker based on microcontroller.

The brain of this tracker is a Paralax basic STAMP II, which decodes satellite coordinates (azimuth and elevation) sent by tracking program. It also controls DC motor based rotators that positions antenna.

Bipolar stepper motors are common in printers. They are different from unipolar steppers. Bipolar steppers usually have four wires (while unipolar 5). Bipolar stepper motors can be driven by using H-bridge circuit like SN754410 from Texas Instruments.

One SN754410 IC can drive single bipolar stepper motor. In this example you may see two of them, so each motor is controlled via separate H-bridge IC. Whole circuit is built around Basic Stamp BX-24 which can be programmed by using Basic language. Sample source code is available for testing.

Do you have a Basic Stamp near by - why not to start with simple project that reads temperature and humidity and displays values on LCD screen.

Here is a sample of Basic source code.

Pedro Miguel have been developing pretty simple GSM alarm unit controlled by BasicX24 stamp module.

He connected Siemens C35 cell phone to to BX24 board and communicated by using AT commands via serial interface. In his test board used a PIR sensors for motion detection. When motion is detected system sends SMS to specified cell phone. Control code is written in basic. Author left project open for future development and expanding.

Reynolds Electronics have collected several nicely documented BASIC Stamp projects. BASIC Stamp Microchip modules are single board computers that run Paralax PBASIC language interpreter on PIC , 8051 or Parallax Sx microcontrollers. Program code is stored in EEPROM memory from where PBASIC program commands are fetched to execute by interpreter. BASIC stamp gained their popularity because if their simple programing language – BASIC. BASIC stamp is easy to use and program and is good choice in low volume engineering projects.

Among projects you will find: A 4-digit “SERIAL” seven-segment LED display BASIC Stamp project, r IR transmitter to Rf converter, Infrared data communications, RS-232 Data Terminal, RS-232 Analog Voltage Meter, The Mini SSC II Serial Servo Controller.

Basic stamp projects may be compiled and edited with PBASIC software which is capable to run under Linux, Mac OS and Windows.