Electronics

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Projects

Teaching Electronics

LTP-3790JG dual-14 segment LED display pinout

Motors

Servos

Stepper Motors

4 pin - bipoliar

6 pin - unipolar. Connect two pins to ground and you have a bipolar again.

Use an H-Bridge to control it.

ICs

Shift Registers

Shift registers are simple little ICs. You "shift in" a series of bits, and 74HC595 - This is an 8-bit shift register.

"Shift in" means set a pin, then toggle the clock pin. That shifts in one bit. Keep doing that until it's full, then toggle the latch pin to set it.

Alternatively, use the Arduino "shiftOut" function. That does it all for you.

Bynase

Bynase is a communications protocol developed by Ward Cunningham, a Portland programmer, geek, electronics hacker, and all around renaissance man.

Bynase is a single wire communications protocol that mimics the way neurons talk to each other, sending more pulses to encode higher values, and fewer pulses to send lower values. The receiver takes a few samples (the more samples, the "cleaner" the signal), and uses the average to get an analog value.

In Ward's words:

Bynase takes inspiration from molecular signaling systems where concentrations encode values. While Bynase is not particularly good at signaling high-speed events, Bynase designs tend to be immune to occasional and short-lived errors. Bynase systems have the feel of hybrid computers (mixed analog and digital) except that the digital component is distributed among all of the "analog" elements.

I think it would be fun to make some bynase-boards that snap together like a puzzle. Each pieces has the bynase "pi" and "po" (as well as power and ground?). This would allow easy/fun chaining of components.

In the short term, these would be some fun bynase modules:

Simple analog value to bynase converter. Uses a 10bit DAC to convert to a digital signal, then sends that value out the Bynase.
Simple motor controller. Bynase in. Drives a DC motor forward or backwards using an H-Bridge and bynase. 50% == stop. 100% == full speed forward. 0% = full speed backwards? That seems like it would fail "full speed backwards".. Maybe it can only control forward motion? Hrm..
i2c slave <-> Bynase. i2c master tells the neuron what to do.
i2c master <-> Bynase. Queries an i2c slave for values and converts that to bynase.