Monthly Archives: February 2014

Low-cost motor control by displaying coloured shapes on a phone or PC screen

Smart phones pack a lot of features (battery, display, sensors, audio i/o, wireless internet connectivity, computing power, etc) into a tiny, convenient, inexpensive package. A smart phone therefore makes a great robot brain and I’ve become fascinated by the idea … Continue reading

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Phasor diagrams in GNU Octave

I’ve been experimenting with plotting phasor diagrams in GNU Octave. This approach may also work in MATLAB, but I haven’t tried that yet. I need to tidy this up a little more to make it convenient to reuse, but I’m … Continue reading

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2D Room Mapping With a Laser and a Webcam

Shane Ormonde, from DIT programme DT009, also recently featured on hackaday.com. His project is a lovely adaptation of a webcam laser range finder (originally by Todd Danko) to scan and map the shape of a room. It’s an ingenious piece … Continue reading

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Motion Tracking on the Cheap with a PIC

Projects by Aron Horan from DIT programme DT009 have recently featured twice on hackaday.com. The first one to be featured was his Dodging Robot, which is pretty nifty, but this one here is an interesting combination of SHARP rangefinder and … Continue reading

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