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Fun with electronics

When I was at university I believed to be busy but in fact I had tons of time. So I had fun with electronics. Here you find a couple of projects I made.

Arduino

Arduino is a fantastic little tool which allows you to do simple electronics. It's a programmable board complete with pins an even coms with LEDs, capacitors, motors and other small electronic deviced with which you can have fun. In this gallery I report just a couple of videos of little circuits I've made. Bonus: It is an italian company!

A button

A button: yes a simple reliable button. It is less simple than you think! You have to give is an algorithm to avoid triggering at random because of noise.

A night light

A light that automatically switches on in the dark . Using a light sensitive resistance. A threshold decides when it's dask enough to switch.

A shaded light

Now the algorithm is more intelligent and it allows to modulate the power that goes through depending on how much light hits the sensor.

Remote control

An IR sensor allows to switch the light with a remote. My algorithm was so stupid that any button would work.

Rainbow

A RGB led is couples with an algorithm that makes it loop through its colors.

You'll find the code for this section on my GitHub

Arduino + RaspberryPi

Now in adding to Arduino adding a RaspberryPi, that is a bit more advanced than Arduino with an actual CPU and RAM you can install Linux on it! This allowed me to make an Android app to move a DC motor on my board.

DC motor

A DC motor based on a magnetic coil and it is switched on and off and goes faster or slower according to how much power you put through it.

I now made the algorithm complex enough that it was multimodal. With the remote I choose the mode. There was a mode to light leds and another to control the moto for example.

Servo motor

A servo motor unlike a DC motor does not continously spin. It is a motor capable to move to a certian position and stay there.

Lighting a tree

Now it starts to get complex. I built a android app in Java. When I switch a button on the app the plug of my shiny tree goes in.

The utltimate level after this was when I bought smart bulbs connected to the wifi and Alexa.

I got the app to connect to them via the RaspberryPi and when I said "Love Lucy" the bulbs would become red and beat like a heart. The video got lost in time. But I still have the code!

I know geeky-cheeky... but fun!

You'll find the code for this section on GitHub: RaspberryPi code and Android App code.

(Be kind, I was young, self-tought and amatorial)

VHDL and FPGAs (in italian)

VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) is a hardware description language used for modeling and simulating digital circuits. It is widely used in FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays).

In the following videos your find how I implemented :

A morse code displayer. Using buttons and leds to choose a value to display and dispay its morse word.
A counter. Binary counting in two directions with a button to switch.

These are developed on an Altera FPGA board.

You'll find the code for this section on my GitHub

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