brainwagon

While watching TV (not very closely) I went ahead and entered the “gyrator” part of the Gyrator VLF circuit. It does indeed seem to work. No real analysis, just the circuit as I built it.

Back on June 7, there was a spectacular coronal mass ejection on the sun: Yes, I did mention this event and gave some links to VLF receivers at the time, but I’ve been thinking about this some more. As an astronomy/telescope buff, I have built simple telescopes for looking at the sun, but I haven’t […]

I own an SDR-IQ software defined radio, a Funcube Dongle (more on that later) and have built a marginally operable Softrock Lite receiver, so you might say I’m interested in Software Defined Radios. But Jeri’s tinkering with her own software defined radio has rekindled my interest in homebrewing one. I was looking for Gerald Youngblood’s […]

I was away all weekend, so I didn’t get a chance to check out my LEDs that I got from Deal Extreme last week. Tonight, I just soldered a couple of clip leads and tried it out when hooked to the linear current modulator that I built (and blogged about) before. The transmitter in this […]

I was having some difficulty with doing screenshots using the code that was on the Gameduino website, so I posted a message on answers.gameduino.com asking for help. James came back in just a few hours with fresh code that now works perfectly. For example:

Without explanation or screen dump, here’s a little program I hacked together. Update: The syntax highlighter I was using is munging this stuff. So, here’s a link to a zip file containing the code. [sourcecode lang=”C++”] #include #include #include unsigned char h, m, s, f ; static PROGMEM prog_uchar pacman_img[] = { 0, 0, 0, […]

My own explorations of FPGA have been, well, slow. Well, let’s be truthful: since buying a BASYS-2 board, I have done little more than ensure that it powers up. But I’m still interested in FPGAs, and so I thought I’d draw attention to a board that I saw for the first time at the Maker […]

I am going to be trying to post some code examples and demos using the Gameduino over the next few weeks. I have an idea for a crazy little demo project that I should be able to hack together in a few hours. I’m curious though: who else has got one, and what are you […]

Awesome. I’ve been having fun with my Gameduino for the couple of days I’ve had it, so I’m glad to see that Seeed Studio has picked them up to offer for sale. The cost is $53, which is identical to the price of the original Kickstarter offering. No need to kick yourself for missing out: […]

I initially overcharged my readers by $1, corrected. Just a cool link to the Kilobot project: an inexpensive platform for exploring cooperative robot swarms. The robots themselves are rather like Bristlebots: they use a pair of vibration motors which bounce the robot on rigid legs, allowing them to turn and move over smooth surfaces. They […]

Okay, so yesterday I did some sprite animation and learned a bit about how color maps work on the Gameduino. I didn’t have a lot of time to tinker with the Gameduino tonight, but I did want to test my understanding of sprites, so I made a simple little program to display my brainwagon logo […]

My recent playing with the Gameduino had me thinking more about games like Space Invaders, and while I was searching around for bitmaps, I kept thinking about the sound effects. I didn’t realize this, but they were not digital sounds, but sounds produced by triggering a series of analog circuits. The schematics and some analysis […]

I received a cute gadget in the mail the other day: a Gameduino. It’s a small Xilinx FPGA on an Arduino shield that can create VGA and sound output. It acts like a simple coprocessor, connected via the SPI bus of the Arduino. In an effort to get people started on thinking about the Gameduino, […]

This morning’s massive coronal mass ejection from the Sun got me scrambling around trying to remember details of how amateurs can monitor solar flare activity during the current solar cycle. Mark Spencer, WA8SME, had some articles on building a small monitoring station that detected SIDs, or “sudden ionospheric disturbances”. The basic idea is to create […]

KB6NU drew my attention to this article on using operational amplifiers in audio design. It’s apparently drawn from material in Douglas Self’s book Small Signal Audio Design. As someone whose really just become involved in the ins and outs of analog electronics, I find his pragmatic approach and explanations to be really helpful. Check it […]