I’ve had this traffic light sitting in the corner of our apartment for a while now – I’ve been meaning to do a traffic light project for a long time and I finally got one as a gift, so naturally it came out to Cali with me when I moved. But until now it’s just sat nicely in the corner, all lights on when plugged in and all lights off when not. Well, I just got my Bluetooth Low Energy shield from Seeed Studio in the other day, so naturally it was time for that to change.
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I use a Weller WESD51 soldering station and I have a few tips. A LOT of tips. 10, and a few more on the way. Until now, I’ve always used the 3 little holes on the soldering iron holder, but they only fit 3 tips, so I needed something with more room. It had to be metal (so hot tips wouldn’t fry it), wide (so nearby objects wouldn’t brush hot tips) and it had to hold the tips a fair distance off the desk so they wouldn’t scorch that, either. Here’s what I came up with.
My brand new pair of Stellaris Launchpads from TI just arrived via FedEx a few minutes ago so I couldn’t resist opening one up. I don’t have time to play with them now, but I noticed a few things right off.
Level shifters are a fact of life for hobbyists working with different logic voltages in the same system. Many systems run on 3.3V, while many others run on 5V, so interfacing 3.3V logic with 5V logic is a very common problem. Lots of solutions exist.
The Mono framework is a great tool for developing cross-platform applications. Using Mono, a developer can target Windows, Linux and OSX all at once using the same C# language and .NET-compatible framework. But arguably the biggest problem with cross-platform toolkits and frameworks is the GUI – people like seeing windows apps that use the familiar Windows Forms GUI toolkit, and people like seeing Mac apps that use Cocoa. With MonoMac, you don’t necessarily have to choose. As a developer, you can build your Mac gui using Cocoa and your Windows GUI using Windows Forms, and reuse all the rest of your application code for both platforms. But integrating Cocoa with C# and .NET isn’t the most straightforward thing. Here are the basics.
If you’re designing a data acquisition system with Wheatstone bridge-based sensors to be measured, the easiest (if not cheapest) solution comes from National Instruments in the form of the NI 9237 CompactDAQ module. Boston University’s Rocket Team (http://www.bu.edu/rocket) will be using this guy in upcoming tests this academic year to make sure our static motor data is as precise and repeatable as possible.