Amy's matlab and arduino driven robot

Tomas

Blog Hiatus

Hi folks,
We won't be posting any new blogs until I am back in the country in early-mid September. This is a pity as there are some projects ungoing. I will try to catch up with some of these later.
Tomas

Software defined radio

This week Gary showed us his progress with software defined radio. Using an AM antenna and appropriate filtering and mixing Gary was able to produce a signal which he could sample on his soundcard. The signal so sampled could then be simply demodulated through low passfiltering or envelope detection to yield the audio signal (a radio program) which you can easily hear at the end of the video. I thought this was a neat example of an increasingly important form of radio.
Tomas

Gers motion switch- basics

Ger has been building a special movement triggered switch which is used in conjunction with an Arduino and PhysPut. Ger is close to finishing a new version of Physput which we will see over the next few weeks. The switch he has built above and demonstrated above is intended to be used in conjunction with a switch-operated universal remote control (this is a specialised piece of assistive technology) . We use a Sparkfun 5DOF gyro and accelerometer board to provide a set of movement signals which are processed to yield a switching signal which drives the universal remote control. In this example Physput is not required.
Tomas

Drum machine progress

Joe is conducting a mega project to build some classic drum machines of the past. This is a quick update from him. I think this is a roland TR-808.

Tomas

Open EEG over Flash

This is a demonstration from Aaron of our Open EEG amplifier being used to measure ECG and our high throughput low latency streaming solution over the web. This is a good example of a rich internet application for signal streaming. One can easily imagine this in use as a connected health application.
Tomas

Alans guitar preamplifier for soundcard based effects

This is a guitar preamp which we have not tested properly however the really neat thing here is how Alan utilised an old cardboard component box (which he turned inside out) as a serviceable enclosure. I think this is a great idea as really in this example the enclosure forms "a durable outer casing to prevent fallapart" (classic Simpsons reference) and cardboard suffices well here.
Tomas