Embedded Systems

📟 Home automation terminal based on Raspberry Pi 4 A project of 3D-printable terminal for a smart house in a cyberpunk style interconnects VOID30 builtin ortholinear keyboard and Home Assistant for getting a stylish interface. Features: ▫️ Step and STLs available for non-commercial use. ▫️ 7" Touch Screen ▫️ Raspberry Pi 4 ▫️ Home assistant loads in kiosk mode ▫️ 5x1 buttons to interact directly with home assistant with physical buttons ▫️ Customizable panels for the front, 3 in the back and a grid for custom attachments More information... #projects #IoT #raspberry

📰 Ansys Just Released Its Free Electronics Desktop Student Ansys recently announced the release of its industry gold-standard simulators in Ansys Electronics Desktop Student, a free software product available for download to anyone who wants to learn about electronics simulation. Ansys Electronics Desktop Student offers free access to the industry simulators for work with antenna, RF, microwave, PCB, IC and IC package designs, along with electromechanical devices such as electric motors and generators. Included software: ▫️ Ansys HFSS is a multipurpose, full-wave 3D electromagnetic simulation software. ▫️ Ansys Maxwell is a 3D electromagnetic simulation solver for electric machines and electromechanical devices. ▫️ Ansys Q3D Extractor calculates the parasitic parameters of resistance, inductance, capacitance and conductance for electronics designs. ▫️ Ansys Icepak is a computational fluid dynamics solver for electronics thermal management. Download the software... #news #design

📡 Top 6 IoT Communication Protocols The communication protocol is the set of rules for data exchange between electronic devices ZigBee is attributed with benefits for low power consumption, high scalability, strong security, and durability. LoRa is known for its capabilities to communicate across long-ranges with the least power consumption. Specially designed to accommodate millions of devices besides supporting low-cost mobile secure communication in IoT, smart city, or industrial applications. NB-IoT is specifically designed for networks that require low bandwidth to support massive connection density. Wi-Fi is the most popular for wireless local area network. Thread is specially designed to address the unique interoperability, security, power, and architecture challenges in the IoT, thread is a low-power wireless mesh networking protocol. Bluetooth Low Energy supports many-to-many communications simultaneously between all devices in a network for fast and reliable data transmission. #articles #IoT

📚 Sean Westcott, Jean Riescher Westcott - Basic Electronics Theory and Practice (2020) This book is an introduction appropriate for both the student and hobbyist to the theory and practice of electronics including advances in microcontrollers, sensors, and wireless communication. The book leads the reader through introductory understanding of: ▫️ The science underlying electronics ▫️ Learning the roles of the components ▫️ Building basic circuits ▫️ The application of digital theory ▫️ Sensors, motors, and microcontrollers Each chapter contains a brief lab to demonstrate the topic covered then moving onto the final part which combines the knowledge mastered by building a programmable robot. Download the book (.pdf, 25 MB) #books #electronics #beginner

⚒ Converting 3D Printer into PCB Production Machine A series of videos in which author automated the PCB making process Convert your 3D Printer into a light duty CNC mill! Author showed engraving, drilling and cutting single sided copper clad board to make a PCB with a Dremel style rotary tool attached to his HyperCube 3D Printer. More information: Part one Part two #video #projects

📚 Edward Y.L. Gu - Advanced Dynamics Modeling, Duality and Control of Robotic Systems (2021) This book provides detailed fundamental theoretical reviews and preparations necessary for developing advanced dynamics modeling and control strategies for various types of robotic systems. This research book specifically addresses and discusses the uniqueness issue of representing orientation or rotation, and further proposes an innovative isometric embedding approach. The novel approach can not only reduce the dynamic formulation for robotic systems into a compact form, but it also offers a new way to realize the orientational trajectory-tracking control procedures. Download the book (.pdf, 16 MB) #books #control #matlab #robots #design

📚 Edward Y.L. Gu - Advanced Dynamics Modeling, Duality and Control of Robotic Systems (2021) This book provides detailed fundamental theoretical reviews and preparations necessary for developing advanced dynamics modeling and control strategies for various types of robotic systems. This research book specifically addresses and discusses the uniqueness issue of representing orientation or rotation, and further proposes an innovative isometric embedding approach. The novel approach can not only reduce the dynamic formulation for robotic systems into a compact form, but it also offers a new way to realize the orientational trajectory-tracking control procedures. Download the book (.pdf, 16 MB) #books #control #matlab #robots #design

📃 Tradeoffs Between Edge Vs. Cloud Analytical article on the latest tendencies in IoT field Edge computing is on the upswing because of the process technology, innovations in the AI hardware design, and because we are doing processing in fixed point, like 8-bit, you can put a lot of processing power on devices like mobile platforms. But computing at the edge also has limitations. When you cannot do something on the edge, because devices are not powerful enough, you have to do them in the cloud. The real value of the cloud, in this case, is a broader analysis of processed data that is less time-sensitive. An edge system may need to do its own analytics for its primary task. An example is a drone that is examining an electrical tower. It may detect something and immediately has to act on that to figure out what the issue is. When it returns to its home base, it may transfer a lot more data that you want to analyze in the cloud. There are different layers of processing that could be done. #articles #IoT

🎬 ESP-NOW - a new protocol for Wi-Fi data transfer between ESP32 or ESP8266 ESP-NOW is a protocol ideally suited to sending out small amounts of data (up to 250 characters). In this video, author uses ESP32 as receiver and an ESP8266 as transmitter and demonstrates the work of the protocol. https://youtu.be/lkHdk_mKGUw #video #esp32

📟 T-Watch-2021 - open-source ESP32 round smartwatch with touchscreen and extended battery LilyGo designed the T-Watch 2021 which builds upon the Open-Smartwatch but adds features like a touchscreen display, a vibration motor, a magnetometer, and ships as a devkit with board and display or a complete smartwatch kit including a 500mAh battery. Specifications: ▫️ LILYGO T-micro32 module based on ESP32-PICO-D4 (wireless module) ▫️ 1.3-inch circular touchscreen LCD with 240×240 resolution (Model GC9A01) ▫️ 3-axis BMA423 accelerator, pedometer ▫️ QMC5883L 3-axis magnetometer, compass ▫️ 5V/1A power input (USB Type-C) ▫️ Battery protection chip (MCP73831) More information: Main article Github page #projects #esp32

🎚 Pimoroni Plasma 2040 Review: Super Bright, Super Easy The Pimoroni Plasma 2040 is really easy to use. Connect your RGB LEDs, load up some code and rainbows are bestowed upon you. We’ve used many different RGB LED controllers in the past and we have even made our own for the holidays, but the Plasma 2040 is almost plug and play. You can use screw terminals to connect APA102 (four wires) and WS2812 (three wires) RGB LEDs with power being provided by the USB C port, up to 3A at 5V. Using this power source, and allowing 90mA for the Plasma 2040, you can run approximately 48 NeoPixels at full brightness, but if we drop the brightness to 90% we can theoretically run up to 100 LEDs. The number of LEDs that can be run from the 3A supply depends on the brightness, color and animation / patterns in use. Specifications: ▫️ RP2040 microcontroller ▫️ Dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz ▫️ 264KB SRAM, 2MB Flash memory More information... #boards

📚 MagPi (September 2021) The latest copy of the official Raspberry Pi magazine. 42 pages of projects & tutorials. Inside The MagPi magazine #109: ▫️ 20 Raspberry Pi Pico projects. The best ideas for new builds using your microcontroller board. ▫️ Automated model railroad. How one maker is using Raspberry Pi to control a model railroad. ▫️ Creating a SID-based synthesizer. Using multiple sound chips from the Commodore 64 to build a synth like no other. ▫️ Raspberry Pi Student Guide. Get back to school in style with our guide to using Raspberry Pi as a learning powerhouse. ▫️ Amazing game developer projects. Make that game you’ve always wanted with Raspberry Pi. ▫️ Learn Python with Raspberry Pi. Get started with this excellent programming language. ▫️ Automate your standing desk. Stopping sitting around and stand up… on command. ▫️ Using AI to detect high-intensity workouts. ▫️ ...and more! Download the book (.pdf, 29 MB) #books #raspberry #magpi #python

📟 Tomu - open-source ultra tiny development board An ARM board that fits inside your USB connector Tomu is user-programmable, has two buttons and two LEDs, and can be used for everything from a hobbyist device to a U2F security token. Tomu is open-source. You can download the hardware schematics, make your own circuit board, and inspect how all the pieces work together. You can download the software source code and trace programs as they run. Tomu is flexible. Maybe you want volume buttons on the side of your laptop. You can load software onto Tomu that uses the two buttons for Volume Up and Volume Down. Or maybe you want to be able to put your computer to sleep or wake it up from a USB hub. With Tomu, you can turn any USB port into an input device simply by uploading new software to it. More information: Official website Github page #projects #boards

📃 The Tesla Dojo Chip Is Impressive, But There Are Some Major Technical Issues An interesting analytical article from SemiAnalysis about recently presented chip from Tesla One of Tesla’s biggest draws is that the chip-to-chip interconnect is incredibly powerful. It’s more an order magnitude higher bandwidth than the competing ASICs and Nvidia. Tesla achieved this by packing every edge of the die with 112G SerDes. This IP is entirely licensed from Tesla’s partnership with a 3rd party provider. With a total of 576 of these SerDes, they reach a mindboggling 8TB/s IO. In order to get this massive IO out of the chip, Tesla has to rely on very exotic packaging. Their chip packaging is ludicrously expensive, but it is the only way to get 8TB/s of IO out of such a small package. Normal LGA style packaging that a desktop or server CPU would utilize would not have anywhere near enough pins. More information... #articles #electronics

📟 Magnetic Field Visualizer This project is about developing a simple magnetic field visualizer. Here, the XMC1100 is the system MCU with fetches magnetic field data of a nearby magnet from the TLV49 3D magnetic sensor. The MCU communicates with the sensor over I2C protocol. For visualizing the data, an E-Ink display is added to the system. The display is 3.3 V like rest of the system and communicates with the host MCU over SPI. This visualizer can be used for : ▫️ Identifying North/South poles of a magnet ▫️ Magnet's orientation/heading on XY plane ▫️ Visualize virtual Field lines ▫️ Detect effective field area of a magnet ▫️ Compare magnets strength qualitatively More information... #projects #sensors

📚 Christopher Kormanyos - Real-Time C++: Efficient Object-Oriented and Template Microcontroller Programming (2018) This book is a highly practical guide to programming real-time embedded microcontroller systems in C++. ▫️ Provides a foundation for real-time C++ by covering language technologies, including object-oriented methods, template programming and optimization ▫️ Presents detailed descriptions of a variety of C++ components that are widely used in microcontroller programming. ▫️ Describes mathematical methods and generic utilities that can be employed to solve recurring problems in real-time C++. The target audience of this book mainly consists of students and professionals interested in real-time C++. Readers should be familiar with C or another programming language. Download the book (.pdf, 5 MB) #books #cpp #programming

📃 Next-Gen Chips Will Be Powered From Below Buried interconnects will help save Moore's Law Delivering the current to billions of transistors is quickly becoming one of the major bottlenecks in high-performance SoC design. As transistors continue to be made tinier, the interconnects that supply them with current must be packed ever closer and be made ever finer, which increases resistance and saps power. This can't go on: Without a big change in the way electrons get to and from devices on a chip, it won't matter how much smaller we can make transistors. Power consumption is crucial whether you're worrying about the cooling bill for a data center or the number of times you have to charge your smartphone each day. In today's processors both signals and power reach the silicon from above. New technology would separate those functions, saving power and making more room for signal routes. More information... #articles #electronics

📟 Thread Sensor Tag Monkey Store’s Thread Sensor Tag is an open-source pressure, humidity, temperature, and light sensor that connects to the OpenThread network, and is capable of transmitting MQTT/UDP data every 20 seconds over a period of around three years from a single coin cell battery. Thread Sensor Tag specifications: ▫️ VEMLS6030 I2C light sensor ▫️ MS8607 pressure, humidity, and temperature sensor ▫️ Minew MS88SF2 Wireless module ▫️ Cortex-M4 Microcontroller ▫️ Power – Coin cell battery More information... #projects #sensors #IoT

🔋 New Lithium-Metal Battery Could Revolutionize Electronics In the past, lithium-metal batteries have been extremely unstable and even exploded, making them far too dangerous to push out to the commercial world. But with the new advances uncovered by researchers at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU), they could last far longer and be much safer. The new battery uses a combination of cobalt-poor, nickel-rich layered cathode (NCM88) and a commercially available organic LP30 electrolyte, which, when working together, enable storage of high energy per mass and a largely stable capacity over many cycles, per the researchers. And the results are remarkable. Its energy density is above the 500-Wh/kg typical threshold that's used to power next-gen EVs, and well above the regular 250-300-Wh/kg energy density that lithium-ion batteries provide. Moreover, the team explained that its new lithium-metal battery retained 88% of its initial storage capacity after 1,000 cycles. More information... #news #battery

🐱 The 3D-printable Ultimate Cloud Cat Feeder Awesome project of a fully automated cat feeder with cloud hosted info dashboard about your cat, which can be used for further analysis of your pet. More information: 3D-printable files PCB materials Software part #projects #IoT #electronics