Touch screens are fast becoming the “standard” for use in your homebrew projects. One of the more popular ones is the Nextion unit. In this first installment of a tutorial series, we’ll download the Nextion IDE Editing Software, load several prefabbed objects, and check our work on a simulator.
A voltage divider is probably the most common electronic circuit. Despite its simplicity, it can be a design challenge for many folks, particularly beginners. This article presents a fast and accurate way to design a variable voltage divider with minimum math.
The Parallax Propeller chip is an impressive multi-core microcontroller ... and the Propeller FLiP board makes it even more powerful! See how to integrate these together in your projects.
If you use microcontrollers in your projects, imagine how helpful it would be to see the data in a graphical format, rather than just a series of numbers -- especially when debugging! MakerPlot does all of this and connects directly to your microcontroller’s serial port to display analog and digital data in graphical form; it’s DIY software for your microcontroller projects.
By now, you’ve certainly heard of the forthcoming fifth generation (5G) wireless technology. There’s a tremendous amount of hype about 5G as the various cellular operators try to pre-sell you on the new benefits and services. Commercial 5G services won’t go online until later this year, but we should see plenty of 5G action in 2020. For that reason, you’ll need to know more about 5G to understand what impact it will make on you and the world in general. Here’s a status report to bring you up to speed.
After reading the May-June 2018 NV article on Ohm’s law, I thought a follow-up article that goes a little deeper might be in order. Specifically, how Ohm’s Law together with a computer and a couple of tricks can be used to calculate the time dependence of much more complex circuits involving not just resistors but capacitors, inductors, op-amps ... you name it! In this article, I’ll describe a simple numerical method that is intuitive and solves many complex problems with just a few lines of code. No simulator needed!
Build an Arduino-based spectrophotometer to explore how the optical density of bacteria suspended in a liquid can be used to measure the rate and stage of bacteria growth.
If you’ve written a program for a microcontroller board such as the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Propeller QuickStart, you have relied on software libraries that provide constants and functions. Often, we use software libraries without thinking much about them. Even if you never create a library, you probably want to know how they work and what they contain. This tutorial provides information that gives you a good start.
It was 1923, and radio was the phenomenon of the day. Over 600 broadcast stations were on the air, and Americans bought 100,000 receivers that year. (Sales would jump to 1,500,000 in 1924.) Many owners hosted “radio parties” and danced to the latest jazz music with their friends. At the same time, the game of Bridge was sweeping the country. Read how one card company used this “new technology” to promote their products.
Backlash can have a detrimental effect on tool life and on your CNC router’s ability to maintain accurate positioning of the X, Y, and Z axes. In this article, we’ll look at the problem of backlash in CNC routers. Once you understand what role it plays, you’ll want to diminish its impact on your machine. Whether you own or intend to build/buy a CNC router, make it a habit to routinely check for backlash. It could save you some money and/or aggravation.
