Engineering piece by piece

Engineer to win – Carroll Smith

andreidanescu — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:29:32 +0000

Good read on mechanical parts, some metallurgy and a few nuts and bolts

A few “green” machines that spit fire

andreidanescu — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:36:06 +0000

This little baby goes on the Ultima GTR

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_jEbpScEZ0

Vehicle Dynamics

andreidanescu — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:07:31 +0000

A fun and practical way to test a bit of theory and different possible set-ups for an offroad car.

(- Of course you need prior knowledge on the subject and some imagination as it’s not quite the real deal -)

http://www.hpieurope.com/kit-info.php?lang=en&partNo=10505

Thanks ARM/mBED for the letting us play with your toys

andreidanescu — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 08:57:33 +0000

This little line follower was programmed using the mbed controller. It was done in 5 minutes and great fun.

The race is on )))

PSoC 1 dev board

andreidanescu — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:03:24 +0000

This is a small dev board for the PSoC 1. if you are interested post a reply and I will upload all schematics and CAD.

Stuxnet is the Hiroshima of cyber-war!!!

andreidanescu — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:57:33 +0000

This article is probably the best I read lately!

A Declaration of Cyber-War

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-201104

New toy on the desk

andreidanescu — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 13:36:44 +0000

http://www.xtz.se/uk/products/mearurement-system/room-analyzer

Ok, considering that I invested some time/ money and effort in my listening room (see older post) I thought it might be a good idea to measure it.

The first sweeps using a simple 20-20k Hz sine generator showed a room resonance around 60Hz that was quite annoying! Unfortunately there was no more time to improve anything – the room sits in my parents house – Romania, and I sit in Birmingham UK. But there is still enough to improve!

Lately a nice piece of kit caught my eye – XTZ room-analyzer. Looked like what I needed to finish up my room design, so I bought one from Audiosanktum.co.uk – the main retailer for England.

The experience I had with it proved positive. It’s very simple to use, gives good – similar results on consecutive measurements and has other features except room-analysis – you can do near-field measurements with it, meaning you can measure the response (past crossover) of each speaker driver.

There are a few other nice things you can use it for but I must test further myself.

All in all it is a good investment if you feel you are not getting the most of your audio set-up. It’s also a very good tool in case you plan to create a dedicated listening room in the near future!

Here are the pictures of my listening room:

RC Dyno

andreidanescu — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:12:10 +0000

http://sites.google.com/site/simpledyno/

This seems like a very good way to learn more about your RC car and develop some tuning skills. Will start building one soon and update the post!

Nothing else matters!

andreidanescu — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:30:12 +0000

Artaflex 2.4GHz and the nifty PSoC

andreidanescu — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 01:03:27 +0000

HI!!!!!

This is a working example of a PSoC project using the wi-fi from Artaflex. It’s very hard to find a simple example as this one so I post it here. The important thing to remember is that it’s my first fully working code on this RF module AND I did not implement any feature yet. unfortunately I cannot attach the project, so use this link from PSoCDeveloper:

http://www.psocdeveloper.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7393

Now, get the PSoC set it on 5V, connect 100ohm resistors and 3.3v zener diodes to Port2 pin 7-3 and feed the RF with 3.3v from a separate supply. Remember to keep grounds connected.

If you do not want to go trough that, although it’s the easy way BY FAR!!!! you can do this:

1- use 3.3v on both PSoC and RF — unless you have a 3v LCD you MUST NOT use the display. Because reading data back from LCD at 5v will mess around with the ZEN state of the circuit

2- use an LCD driver- 3.3v -> 5v.

3- NOT use an LCD but some LEDs you set yourself.