The Sabertooth family of DC Brushed Motor Controllers, made by Dimension Engineering, are versatile and very simple to set up as long as you follow the datasheet/instructions. Below, we will run through some example circuits and behaviors.
(more…)Category: Hardware
Basic Drone Bill of Materials
Dr. McMurrough has compiled a list of known-compatible parts that can be combined for most basic Drone projects.
(more…)Fuses and Circuit Breakers
Fuses and Circuit Breakers are a necessary safety device for all circuits. They come in many shapes, sizes, and colors.
(more…)The CubeOrange Platform
Most of the autonomous systems in the Senior Design labs use the CubePilot CubeOrange system, which is ArduPilot compliant.
(more…)RF Cables
There are a wide number of RF cable types that you might run into in industry or even CSE 4340 (Fundamentals of Wireless Networks) or CSE 4377 (Wireless Communication Systems). Here in the SD labs, you will only see a few of them.
(more…)Multiplexing multiple I2C sensors: TCA/PCA9548A
One of the major limitations to I2C is the inherent address conflicts when you try to bus multiple sensors of the same type/family together. While all sensors have a default address, some give an option for a secondary, and fewer give tertiary addresses or beyond. Since most systems only have one I2C bus, you are limited in how many of those sensors are used.
The 9548 family of modules solves this problem: they are multiplexer.
(more…)6DOF Accelerometer + Gyroscope
For general object control, a 6DOF is the most useful IMU, having 3 axises of Accelerometer and Gyroscope. While 9DOF adds a 3 axis magnetometer, those are generally not used for most projects unless you need absolute tracking of magnetic North, and are prepared to have noise filtering from any Electro-Motive Fields near the sensor.
(more…)Sparkfun Serial 7-Segment Display
Sparkfun has made life much easier when working with 7-segment displays. To do so, they made their own PCB which has an Atmel 328P on the back and a 4-digit 7-segment display on the front.
(more…)RasPi: Node Red with GUI
Node Red is an application built upon NodeJS which supports interfacing the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi via a webpage GUI.
It does not require that Apache or PHP be pre-installed, it can also run concurrently with Apache and PHP if they are.
Analog to Digital Converters
Measuring voltages is a common task in electronics and is accomplished using Analog to Digital Converters. Some microcontrollers and Single-Board computers have them built in, but some do not.
(more…)