Electronics Adventures

      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 96x65 Monochrome LCD with a blue backlight. Here, I have written the driver code omitting graphic options like drawing line, chars, shapes etc. Just the pixel level access of the display is implemented in MSP430 microcontroller. A PC side program written in C++ is used to stream a 96x65 Monochrome bitmap image to the display through UART. STREAMING IMAGES FROM PC:    Any monochrome image of size 96x65 can be streamed from PC through serial port to the msp430. The source image processing in host side is done using OpenCV library. The pixels are offset,concatenated and mapped to LCD’s byte. Then the bytes are transferred through COM port at Baudrate of 9600. The following diagram shows the architecture of host side application. MICROCONTROLLER :     Since the MSP430 Launchpad supports a max

 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 Instruments ICs. Another mouthwatering offer was, we were allowed to order any Evaluation kit/module from TI which costs below $200.  Unable to resist the urge, I applied for the contest and cleared PHASE 1, which required us to design an Instrumentation amplifier and analyze their parameters. It was then the proposed project as mentioned in the title began. GOAL: The goal was to design a module which can be worn on the head similar to a tiara that helps the  differently abled person to control a computer just by tilting their heads and emulating a mouse  with voice commands. The inputs to the module were as follows. Head Gestures, which

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 mode. It senses the motion data from a 2-axis accelerometer using the ADC. The accelerometer is set at high 'g' and the voltage range obtained was around 0.8V to 2V with 1.35V at neutral position for both axis. For example, an extreme left tilt will give 0.8V and on the right side would be 2V. We added a filter capacitor to each axis output to minimize the noise in voltage. The following sketch was rendered by diptrace. The initial position (null position) is taken as reference by Atmega-8 using its ADC. The tilts are computed and are compared with t

  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 testing since they operate on low frequencies. Components used: MSP430G2231 microcontroller MSP430 Launchpad 3.3V Voltage regulator * USB-Serial Converter * BC547 transistors * Switches * LEDS * Connectors,General Purpose board,wires,etc *      * - Optional   I have made the entire circuit in a stand-alone pcb here. This can be very well implemented with Launchpad alone since it has everything onboard.The overall block diagram is given below.   The input signal should have the voltage range of 0-3.3V since anything out of this range is dangerous to msp430. Now