"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea"
Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem. It can play up to 22KHz, 12bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It’s low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer.
This shield is a kit, and comes with all parts you need to build it. Arduino, SD card, tools, speaker and headphones are not included. It is fairly easy to construct and anyone with a successful soldering project under their belt should be able to build it.
The shield comes with an Arduino library for easy use; simply drag uncompressed wave files onto the SD card and plug it in. Then use the library to play audio when buttons are pressed, or when a sensor goes off, or when serial data is received, etc. Audio is played asynchronously as an interrupt, so the Arduino can perform tasks while the audio is playing.
Can play any uncompressed 22KHz, 16bit, mono Wave (.wav) files of any size. While it isnt CD quality, it is certainly good enough to play music, have spoken word, or audio effects. Check out the demo video/audio at the webpage
Output is mono, into L and R channels, standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a connection for a speaker that is switched on when the headphones are unplugged
Files are read off of a FAT16-formatted SD/MMC card
Included library and examples makes playing audio easy
Please note that the library is rather bulky, requiring 10K of flash and more than 1/2 K of RAM for buffering audio. It works fine using an ATmega168-based Arduino (or compatible) but for more complex projects I strongly recommend upgrading to an ATmega328!/li>
More information, including design notes, schematics, library, examples, etc is at the Wave Shield webpage
From Albert Einstein in tennis shoes to smoke cannons, future spacecraft to human Rubix Cubes, the USA Science & Engineering Festival celebrated innovation and included something for every future engineer or scientist.
The two-day festival on the National Mall over the Oct. 22 weekend drew tens of thousands of participants, many of them students who were able to get hands-on experience with technologies ranging from alternative energy to aerospace. Elementary, middle and high school students asked and answered questions, participated in applied physics lessons, tore apart gadgets, raced to solve the Rubix Cube in record time and listened to interactive lectures by legendary scientists like Albert Einstein (portrayed by some very convincing impersonators).
So i’ve been working on this project for a while now as part of my thesis and independently and work is still continuing. So just an overview the project is a multi-touch and multi-modal input sensor that can be utilised behind traditional LCD panels utilising a new method to detect inputs. By using a large IR sensor array consisting of 128 sensors behind the LCD panel and IR light source in front of the Panel we are able to augment the display with the ability to sense a variety of objects near or on the surface; including fingers tips and hands and thus permitting us to enable multi-touch interaction. The inherent nature of the senors allows us to create a low cost high fidelity image sensor allowing us to take advantage of optical sensing which also allows other physical items to be detected, and thus permits us to develop multi-modal interaction schemas. The Videos below are of a prototype hardware unit that i created. utilising Rev 17 of the sensor board that i developed and created.
Lady Ada wants to help you make things and has a place you can get things from and a forum and a wiki and a blog and shares photos, and is a hacker and a maker and generally seems to be someone who wants to help you be creative and make neat things…Lady Gaga… well, I’m still not sure what the hell she does…
Companies like Adafruit and Sparkfun seem to be leading the way toward making hobby electronics accessible again to the entry level experimenter. They produce very simple (as well as complex) products. The put tiny smt parts on big break-out boards. They provide great tutorials. It is different than it was, but I think electronics is getting back to a place where youngsters can fairly easily get engaged and involved again.
I know a company that would be at the top of my list for being the poster child of customer focused operations and service. I’ve had the opportunity, actually I’d say pleasure to be a customer of adafruit industries for just over a year now and with each business transaction they have exceeded my expectations in some manor or another.
Whether it was shipping my order within hours of my purchase, answering my stupid questions about one of their fabulous products within minutes and even generously providing me a few free plastic parts when one of those fabulous products was mangled by my overzealous need to tighten screws just that little bit too much. Yes, adafruit industries is definitely at the top of my list!
This page describes the assembly, programming and use of a device that constantly monitors heart rate and stores the data on an SD memory card. The data can be read from the card, imported into MS Excel (or other programs) for graphing or other analysis. I use this device to track my effort level on bike rides.
You can get going quickly – saving data to files on any FAT16 or FAT32 formatted SD card, to be read by any plotting, spreadsheet or analysis program. We even have a tutorial on how to use two free software programs to plot your data The included Real Time Clock timestamps all your data with the current time, so that you know precisely what happened when!
Please note that this item does not come with an Arduino (you’ll need one to use with the shield), or an SD card. It does come with the RTC battery, however. The kit is un-assembled, You’ll need some basic soldering skills to put it together, but even if you don’t have much experience you can get it done in under 1 hour.
SD card interface works with FAT16 or FAT32 formatted cards. 3.3v level shifter circuitry prevents damage to your SD card
Real time clock (RTC) keeps the time going even when the Arduino is unplugged. The battery backup lasts for years
Included libraries and example code for both SD and RTC mean you can get going quickly
Prototyping area for soldering connectors, circuitry or sensors.
Onboard 3.3v regulator is both a reliable reference voltage and also reliably runs SD cards that require a lot of power to run
You will be tasked with porting over the code of a specific embedded project to a Renesas (formerly NEC) 78K0R family 16-bit microcontroller. This position is temporary, with a slight possibility to become permanent, depending on market conditions.
Want to learn something about electronics, but don’t know where to start? Electronics for Absolute Beginners is a one day course that I originally designed for the women’s arts and technology group MzTEK. We had an excellent first run in January 2010 with lots of enthusiasm, and considerable skill from all the participants.
The course introduces the key electronic components and tries to give an intuitive feel for how circuits work. It provides plenty of opportunity to try experiments on the circuits suggested and should give people enough understanding to feel they can build and modify circuits in future.
Each stage of the course introduces new ideas that build and develop throughout the day. There are lots of fun circuits ending up with an electronic organ and a chain-light sequencer.
ayah did a great job compiling the feedback for the open hardware definition draft 0.4. the compiled document is here (http://goo.gl/Dzbe). this lists the definition clauses as they stand today in the draft, and below that – points/comments made by people in the forums, lists, etc – article comments and the OHdefinition list.
there are very few contentious points right now. for the most part we seem to be very close to a consensus. particularly interesting are changes bruce perens made to the definition, and the addition of a licenses and hardware section.
interested parties, please review the doc and post here if we’ve missed anything.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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