I’ve had this traffic light sitting in the corner of our apartment for a while now – I’ve been meaning to do a traffic light project for a long time and I finally got one as a gift, so naturally it came out to Cali with me when I moved. But until now it’s just sat nicely in the corner, all lights on when plugged in and all lights off when not. Well, I just got my Bluetooth Low Energy shield from Seeed Studio in the other day, so naturally it was time for that to change.
Category: Electronics
My brand new pair of Stellaris Launchpads from TI just arrived via FedEx a few minutes ago so I couldn’t resist opening one up. I don’t have time to play with them now, but I noticed a few things right off.
Level shifters are a fact of life for hobbyists working with different logic voltages in the same system. Many systems run on 3.3V, while many others run on 5V, so interfacing 3.3V logic with 5V logic is a very common problem. Lots of solutions exist.
If you’re designing a data acquisition system with Wheatstone bridge-based sensors to be measured, the easiest (if not cheapest) solution comes from National Instruments in the form of the NI 9237 CompactDAQ module. Boston University’s Rocket Team (http://www.bu.edu/rocket) will be using this guy in upcoming tests this academic year to make sure our static motor data is as precise and repeatable as possible.
I just recently got a good deal on a second-hand Hantek DSO1060 – not the greatest scope in the world at 60MHz bandwidth/2ch/150MS/s (note: sub-nyquist for two channel). However, for what I paid, it was a darn good deal, especially since I don’t have a true DSO with your standard math functions (my main scope is the Tek 2221a, which has both analog and digital modes, where digital has none of the niceties like FFT/multiply/divide).
Coincidentally, I also just found myself building from spare parts, then trying to troubleshoot, a computer that happened to sporadically restart itself with no obvious cause. After loading the bios, then noticing odd case fan behavior where it would spool up and down over and over, then noticing the BIOS reporting highly unstable voltages, I started suspecting the power supply. And out came the DSO1060!
