Your Electronics Open Source

At the Retis laboratory of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, a moving ball was visually tracked using FLEX board with a CMOS camera.
Movements of a freely rolling ball was visually tracked, within the visual envelope of the CMOS camera, using FLEX board . The CMOS Camera is capable of returning JPEG images to the connected FLEX board hosting a Microchip dsPIC. The Flex Board also controls two servomotors which are used to articulate the camera, thereby maintaining the focus on the rolling ball.

FLEX is born as a development board where to easily develop and test real-time applications for the Microchip microcontrollers (Datasheet 2.0). Scilab/Scicos is a code generator for the FLEX Board.
Let's see how to control a DC Motor Servo using FLEX with Scilab/Scicos.

Many RF technologies are competing on 2.4GHz. The WLAN and Bluetooth have dominated the consumer wireless market. Zigbee is getting hotter in mesh network application as well. More and more chip vendors have released chipsets for Zigbee. Because it is a a wireless mesh network, the initial investment is much higher than a single node smart controller. A serious development on a Zigbee project will involves ICs, the Zigbee stack, the application software in the network nodes and the network administration software. TI/Chipcon, Freescale, Microchip, Atmel, Slilabs and Amber are active in Zigbee market.

Now that we started with VHDL let’s see another example full of empirical rules that help us to take out the hindrance.
A VHDL project
The most important rules in these type of design are:

The application is a disk loader in optical disk driver. This software module controls the motor operation according to the external interrupt from a position sensor. This module works fine independently, but the motor can not stop at the designated position occasionally after integration with other modules.
The engineer checked the code for the motor driver. This code is very simple, which writes port register with H/L values.

Medical explication
Diabetes is a disorder that affects the way our body uses food for energy. Normally, the sugar we take in is digested and broken down to a simple sugar - glucose. The glucose circulates in our blood where it waits to enter cells to be used as fuel. Insulin (a hormone produced by the pancreas) helps move the glucose into cells. A healthy pancreas adjusts the amount of insulin based on the level of glucose. But, if you have diabetes, this process breaks down, and blood sugar levels become too high (watch this video!)

Overview
I do not want to make a course about VHDL as a programming language for HW (there are a lot of books better than my words 1), because courses and specifics of languages are public and everyone can find them easily on the Net. I just want to give some suggestions / recommendations by whom, starting many years ago, has had to develop an endless series of projects at different levels of complexity .

More and more desktop applications are migrated to web based, including Office suite and instant messenger. Now we can find some web enabled devices that can connect to the remote server via regular web page. This blog presents some existing solutions and alternative solutions for such applications.

Crystals are key component of practical electronics devices. The product will malfunction if the crystal stops. They are heartbeat of the product. Because crystals are mechanical devices, it is sensitive to the mechanical damage. Crystals can present challenges to design engineers. However, new packaging methods and careful circuit layout can help to minimize many issues. Improved package designs, such as surface mount, incorporate lower mass and higher pin count to support the crystal body. This are excellent solutions for mechanical vibration related failures. SMT spreads mass over larger base and uses additional leads and improved lead strength. Regardless of the package style used, the body of the crystal should be mounted flush with the board.

The software trap is a programming feature used to capture an abnormal program running status. The general principle is to setup a trap for software, and redirect from the code out of control to a specified address, and get back to its normal running mode. The software traps can be placed between the user codes or after the jump instructions, or be placed in the unused space by a consecutive trap codes. The most popular trap code for 80C51 is 5 byte instruction, which is:

The microcontroller is widely used in many devices, which works in environment. The microcontroller has to face the challenges from EMI, voltage stability, crystal failure and much other interference. If the interferences are strong enough to disturb the operation, the system design should be secure enough to deal with these matters, one good practice is to reset and go on with previous normal operation state . However, a simple reset is not enough at all. I will demonstrate the basic principle for the system reset and state restore. Please keep in mind that the terminologies used in this article may come from different microcontrollers.

This demo shows how to set up a USB connection between the PC and the FLEX board. The aim is to control the dsPIC LED and the PIC18 LED system from the host PC. The dsPIC LED is controlled by the SPI communication with the PIC18.
The application is divided into three parts:
1. In the first part a brief description of the USB set-up is provided. The aim is to give a brief overview of the USB protocol.
2. The second part concerns the dsPIC side with the use of the SPI connection with the PIC18.
3. The third part concerns the PC side application. You can download a simple application under Windows (XP or Vista) to communicate with FLEX in order to switch on and off both LEDs of dsPIC and PIC18.

This software implements a TCP/IP stack demo usable with FLEX boards. It enables communications with the board over an ethernet cable, using a variety of protocols. Here are some of the protocols included in the demo: DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), Secure NTP (Network Time Protocol), Telnet.
The demo was produced adapting the Microchip Technology Inc. TCP/IP Stack (version 4.18) and the related application notes.
This is the list of hardware components needed to use the demo: