Introduction The Moose is a robot for Design Competition 2019. It is designed for configurability in mind. The base design starts with the layout of the battery and the motors to determine the land pattern of the robot. The base board uses a grid of 0.5 by 0.5 in holes designed for 4-40 screws on a piece of acrylic 7in by 7in. By using a grid pattern, it allows the components to be moved and secured in place.Each layer can be added by using standoffs, and this provides additional room to mount additional components. The bottom of the first layer includes the grabbing mechanism and the block finder module. The top of the first layer includes the motors, wheels, and battery, as well as the servo for the block finder. On the second layer the electronics are breadboarded, and on the top layer the sonar and the vive sensors are mounted. ...

This article was first written in 03/27/2017. It has been updated in 2019. The ATtiny85 is a small 8 pin DIP/SOIC microcontroller from ATMEL, now Microchip. While the limited pin-count might seem to be a limitation, however, it is perfectly suited for small tasks where a larger microcontroller would be an overkill. Some examples include reading a few sensors and toggling a light. The small footprint also allows space to be conserved on space-constrained PCB boards ...

What is it? A universal breakout board for QFN and TQFP chips with integrated clock and power lines. Once this board is set up, the only things you have to breadboard are two wires: power and ground. When you remove the board, you take all the capacitor and clock connections with you. Why is it cool? **Less waste! **When you want to use the breadboard for something else, instead of throwing away the random bits of wire and capacitors, you take it with you when you remove the breakout board from the circuit. Easier setups! You don’t have to dig through the datasheet to figure out which pin has to be grounded and which has to be powered. Once you do it, it is set, so you can easily continue a project if you remove a board from a breadboard. The problem I like to try out new chips. Sampling chips is a great way for me to explore new chips and test their capabilities. ...

What is it? This is a two-axis robotic arm that was explicitly designed to assist in learning and developing algorithms for robotics. This was a two quarter capstone design course that involved Mechanical, Electrical, and Software engineering. Arm from the top view Why is this cool? This arm is cool because it is the first low friction, desktop-sized robotic arm that is direct drive. There were quite a number of engineering challenges that had to be overcome to achieve this, and I’m quite proud to be part of the team that designed this robot. ...

I really like the ST7735 LCD. It is large enough to display a lot of relevant information at once, but small enough to still be portable. It also has RGB colors, so you can really display some interesting graphs and information with this screen. It is a popular LCD because the communication method is well supported and understood. One LCD is about $2, which really makes it an attractive option as a debugging tool. For example, if your code isn’t working, sometimes it might be helpful to print out the internal details to a screen instead of back to a terminal, especially for mobile systems like robots. ...

This was the project that started it all. This was the final project of the class Engineering System Design I. In this class, we were taught how to design and produce a webcam from scratch, from the programming, to the PCB and CAD design of the case. Design Top with camera Bottom with WiFi chip and power jack This webcam is driven by a ATSAM4S8B chip. It processes the incoming data from the OV2640 webcam and stores it to memory before streaming it bit-by-bit to the Zentri WiFi chip on the reverse side. The Zentri chip is programmed to connect to the wireless network as well as host a website to display the images. Without optimization, our design was able to display images at a rate of about 3 frames a second. ...

Why is this cool? This is a melody generator that is housed in a tiny 3 pin package. It is mostly used for toys and sounds. Old part day I found this music generator in the trash with some other electronics. I was initially inclined to throw it away, but I saw that it had a speaker attached to it, and a intriguing pair of connectors that said 3V and GND. ...

Why is this cool? It is a low cost microcontroller from microchip manufacturer Silicon Labs in the US that could find many uses for small projects as an alternative to the SAMD10 or PIC16. This is my first microcontroller that uses the 8051 from Intel. The EFM8 family comes with multiple variations of the same chip, tailoring them to various tasks. The Universal Bee has USB capabilities and an integrated 3.3V LDO regulator, the Laser Bee is targeted towards analog and digital sensing functions, featuring a 14 bit ADC and a 4 channel 12 bit DAC, the Sleepy Bee is a low power specialist, and the Busy Bee serves as the generalist of the bunch. ...

Tldr; I really like the STM32 and you should definitely give it a whirl. UPDATE [12 October 2019]: ST just integrated Atollic into their CubeMX branding, and it is now known as STM32CubeIDE. It is essentially the same as Atollic TrueStudio with proper STM32CubeMX integration. I wrote a brief post about this. Recently, ST Microelectronics bought Atollic and released TrueStudio as a free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for their STM32 line. The STM32 line is a 32-bit microcontroller line from ST Microelectronics utilizing the ARM Core. This is part of same series of cores that you see in the ubiquitous SAMD21 development boards. ...

This was a final project for a class in Machine Dynamics. The objective was to design a project that showcased all that we learned throughout the quarter. I decided to model a paddle-ball that utilized a strange sort of ball: a triangular ball. However, this would introduce some interesting behavior upon collision. The spring was also made discontinuous, so that only beyond a certain length would there be a spring constant, under this length, the spring acts like a string. ...