Audio Playback using ZPU-Soft Processor in FPGA
Having worked with a variety of microcontrollers from AVR to ARM Cortex controllers, I bought a Xilinx FPGA dev board(papilio One) which around $40 to experiment. After getting comfortable with Verilog HDL, I implemented few data encoders-decoders, communication blocks and played around a while. Then my attention turned towards implementing a Soft-core Processor in FPGA. […]
Shell Scripting to Display Bar Graphs in Linux Terminal
This week was quite hectic for me with course assignments and their merciless deadlines. One such assignment in Advanced Computer Architecture was simulation of various benchmarks in alpha architecture in simplescalar, a well-known computer architecture simulator. I was supposed to run a total of 4 benchmarks with different configurations of cache memory, instruction issue widths, commit […]
Won 2nd place in National Level Electronics Design Contest !!!
Last month could have been never better without the “Electronics For you ” design contest‘s results announcement. I was delighted to find my name at the 2nd place in the winner’s list under Raspberry Pi category for my project named “Smiley-Pi”. Very surprised that my previously discussed project in my blog turned out to be […]
Capacitive Touch Sensing using a Coin & ARM Cortex M4
Couple of years ago, I bought a Capsense add-on from Texas Instruments for MSP-430 Launchpad. It worked right out of the box as expected but a closer observation showed me that the board was nothing but a colored copper plate PCB with catchy SMD LEDS beneath. Curiosity drove me to internet and books which taught […]
Raspberry Pi based Monochrome Video Playback in Nokia 2760 caller ID LCD
Previously, I was successful in interfacing a Nokia caller ID LCD using MSP430 microcontroller. This time I wanted to drive it using the $35 single board computer – Raspberry Pi to display vital information like CPU temperature, IP address or any notifications. This idea then turned into something fun and better. I thought why not […]
Virtual Gesture Input Device Hack using Wiimote
This projects aims at designing a low cost gesture based input device for computers using a Nintendo Wii Remote(Wiimote). This work is inspired by the virtual whiteboard projects done by Johnny Lee of Carnegie Mellon University. He had used windows based bluetooth stack & wiimote interface library with Visual C#. Here I made use of […]
Hacking Nokia 2760 caller ID LCD with MSP430
For quite a long time, I had my Mom’s Nokia 2760 lying idle. So, when I thought of putting it into a good use, the LCDs caught my attention.Nokia 2760 caller ID screen is a 96×65 Monochrome LCD with a blue backlight. Here, I have written the driver code omitting graphic options […]
Gesture and Voice based computer control for differently abled
Many times, I had given a thought about the societal usefulness of my projects and seriously pondered upon an opportunity to implement one. The opportunity came in the form of “Texas Instruments’ Analog Design Contest ” in 2011. The contest required us to design a project of our wish which employs atleast three of Texas […]
AVR based Motion Sensing USB Joystick
Here, an AVR microcontroller (Atmega-8) is used to design a bare minimum motion sensing joystick for controlling games in computer. Components Used: ATmega-8 Microcontroller 2-axis accelerometer (MMA6361) Resistors,Capacitors & Zener diodes USB female connector and cable Headers, Connecting wires An Atmega-8L, overclocked at 12MHz runs virtual USB library and emulates an USB keyboard in HID […]
MSP 430 based Low Frequency Oscilloscope
A crucial equipment for any electronics enthusiast besides multimeter,soldering iron,etc is an Oscilloscope. Unfortunately these oscilloscopes come at a price which students or hobbyists couldn’t afford. Here, a low frequency oscilloscope is designed using TI’s MSP430G2231 microcontroller. The frequency range it could measure is few Khz but that is sufficient for most circuits […]