It seems that “Google” engineer Bill Buzbee isn’t interested in microprocessors that can be purchased in marked. There is more fun to build own. Several years ago he built first “Magic-1” processors, but now he makes its documentations widely available in his project website.

The whole processor is wired of about 200 of 7400 series TTL chips. As result he built a working processor that can be clocked at 4,09MHz and has 4 MB of RAM. This Homebrew processor works under “Minix 2” OS and can be used as WWW server or for playing games.

In present days, it’s definitely not a big deal to connect a GPS receiver to a microcontroller. Normally, the GPS receivers send data and pack into NMEA format, as a serial stream over a serial port!

The only problem is what should we do with the data? For tracking purposes, it’s just only enough to save the data stream to a nonvolatile memory. If you want to visualize the GPS data on your device, such as show your actual position on a map, and then you’re facing two main problems here:

1. Firstly, you have to deal with a big amount of map data.

2. Secondly, the map data underlies restrictive copyright licenses!

Thanks to the incredible OpenStreetMap4Primer2, you can easily overcome the above two problems.

For your information, the OSM4Primer2 is an awesome device, as it allows the map data to be stored and recovered from the micro-SD card.

In this case, you only have to download the desired map data from OSM project and save the map to the micro-SD card. Furthermore, the OSM4Primer2 can be used to extract the actual geographical position out of the NMEA data stream. After that, it displays the correct position on the map instantly!

Do you have any idea, what is the use of Z80 computer for? Basically, it’s a classic Z80 microprocessor that mostly being used to build large TTL DIP components instead of SMD devices.

Z80 computer is slightly different from the Z80 processor based computer, as the latter one normally uses a printed circuit board to connect all the components together. This means, the Z80 computer is built based on prototyping board.

For your information, the Z80 computer is running at 4MHz and 32k of RAM. Honestly, it’s very impressive, especially if you loves to see thousands of grey wires running through the circuit board.

Some of the great features for the Z80 computer are:

• ZiLOG Z80 CPU@4HHz

• 32 kBytes of RAM

• 32×32 char B&W alphabetic display adapter

• 1kBytes of Video RAM

• Full stroke keyboard

• Built-in monitor program

Technically, the machine contains two boards (CPU and video) and a keyboard. You can connect the components to each other via ribbon cables. The character generator and the system ROM can be burning into two 27C256 UV EPROMs. The best way for showing the character generator is to download the C64 character set and burning it as well.

By using the Z80 computer, it’s possible to create your own video board that utilizes a TV as the monitor!

Living in the 21^st century isn’t an easy task. Go figure, with all the never finish workload and lousy job, we’re mostly situated in a very stressful condition! Hence, there are more and more people starting to have sleep disorder in their life…

For those who having the insomnia, it’s very difficult for a person to fall in sleep, as a very slow noise can make him/her await for all night long. If the problem keeps going on, it might leave some serious effects on one person’s health!

That’s why, the Sleep’O’Meter is coming for the rescue! The main purpose of the device is to track the movements of the subject while a person is sleeping. Let’s take an example. If the person has a good night sleep, then he/she won’t move too many times during the sleep.

So, by tracking the moves of the person who sleeps, it’s a piece of cake to count the number of sleep hours!

The Sleep’O’Meter is based on MC33794 and 908QY4. It must be placed in bed or on the mattress to record and reading the data from the EVM demo module KIT33794DWBEVM through the serial port. Normally, the data is recorded and saved, before it’s display on the screen.

The technology is getting better and better every day. Now, there are many industrial have been using the No Moving Parts HMI to help them detects the effects of the human operators’ hands on eight input devices.

Honestly, the No Moving Parts HMI (Human-machine interface) is equipped with the high tech MC33794 e-field sensor, which is often being used in many electronics project that involved sensors on it!

Technically, the input devices are fully-designed around electrodes to produce responses to human interaction, in either digital or analog form. The HMI is normally had two analog speed control inputs and six digital switches.

Three of the digital switches are attached on each side of the two axes. In this case, it can be used to perform the motion control, including of Forward, Reserve and Maintain Speed.

Honestly, the great part of the MC33794 is the repeatability of the signals, which is produced by the electrodes. Hence, once an input device is calibrated, the inactivated and activated signals can be easily interpreted by software! In addition, the calibration are going to be saved in a file that can be recalled, when the program reopens. It prevents the previous work from losing from the database.