new project idea

With the end of my end-sems, my mind is now completely free to plan out my next project. 2-1 was very exciting and provided lots of basics of electronics for me to apply in later stages of my career. One important field was Logic Designing that thought me the basics of binary. Armed with this tool, an engineer can design anything that suits his needs.

Few days ago I noticed a lack of security in residential buildings especially apartments. I wrote myself a problem statement:
Build a security device that protects an apartment and is easy to use. The device should be built according to the needs of a family of four.

I came up with this problem statement with my house and family as the test area. The door of house consists of an auto-lock feature, on closing, that can only be opened, from the inside manually or from the outside using a key. The system is made by Godrej.

I have started analyzing the problem statement. More details in next post.

the cockroach controlled bot

I found this video on youtube. Its an amazing adaptation for controlling a robot. Its not very difficult to build the robot but the idea is too good. Its got a very simple mouse rollerball mechanism consisting of sensors. One thing, I dunno how they managed to keep the roachy on the robot? Any idea?

555 IC timer

The 555 IC timer is an integrated circuit. I used an ST (SGS Thompson Microelectronics) NE555 timer IC to build a multivibrator. A multivibrator is a circuit used for two state systems. I built my circuit to control a motor polarity. But it did not work. This is the first time I experimented with a 555 timer. I used a digital circuits reference book and studied multivibrators. I tried building a astable multivibrator. It switches from off to on by itself without any external trigger. Find more about multivibrators in my next post.

switched-mode power supply

We needed to test the motor to which I had soldered wires. My old PC had a working SMPS(switched-mode power supply). So I pulled it out of the PC and used the floppy power cable as the source. I connected two wires each into the floppy red and yellow power cable. Then I fixed these wires to the breadboard. I took the motor’s wires and completed the circuit and switched on the power supply. The motor was succesfully working, also confirming that I could use the unregulated power supply as my source.

After this my friend and I got on to testing LEDs and switches using the SMPS. We connected each component and tested it. We are planning to make a Regulated Power Supply using C program and parallel port.

gujarati gulli

17°23'9"N, 78°29'0"E is its location and its one of the most important locations for the Engineers in Hyderabad. Located along the Koti Women's Hostel road, Gujarati Gulli consists of all the electronic stores with almost everything from spare parts to basic circuits to CRTs.

I was on a hunt for various sensors and motors. I was in almost every store and found out about the costs of most spare parts. Roland Electronics is the best store with everything I needed for my project available here. Out of the things I bought were IR sensors, 555 IC timers, LEDs (red and green), shafts and a 12V DC motor. All of these costed me less than Rs. 150. There is still more stuff to buy for my project and these are yet to be listed.

first solder

Few days ago I had travelled around the city in search of many electrical and electronic stuff to start off my hobby. I reached "Electronic Bazar" in RP road got hold of a circuit board. The usage of my soldering iron was being held by my UK plug soldering iron, so i also bought a 3 pin converter. Today suddenly it struck me and I took off time to start to learn to solder. It was very easy though. Followed the steps according to a site.
Cleaned all the stuff used to solder and successfully soldered a resistor. Now to continue wid the rest of the circuit.

parallel ports

i jus got this wierd thought. can we control hardware directly thru pc? i went in for some research and learnt a lot. the best method i found out was to use parallel ports. i made an intensive study of parallel ports. i had an extra parallel cable which i used to study. it was easy to open it up.

only pins 2 to 9 are used named as D0-D7. pins frm 14-25 are ground pins. the "hello world" counterpart of lpt1 ports is to use led's soldered to the port and in C we simply use dos.h and outport() function. i am yet to try this as this has the side effect of pc risks.

basic stamp

in desperate attempts to find out how to program microcontrollers and control motors, i came thru this stuff. its calld a basic stamp ckt. parallax inc makes these circuits. pretty expensive off the shelf comng to around 5K big bucks! it consists of a microcontroller pic16c57 wid other components and a serial port. jus plug this port to the pc and code in a lang called pbasic. hit run and the s/w doz the rest. it burns the program into the IC. it turns out much cheaper than an Ic burner but still expensive. i now off to findng a way to build this ckt.

microcontroller

my journey to expt wid live actual electronics started wid an idea to control motors using electronics. the control of motors can then be used for various purposed like device direction, etc. in the process of searching for motors i came across one servo motor. highly expensive (around 800) thn i also got to kno about microcontrollers. basically these IC's are used to program and connect to the motor wich controls wen the motor has to rotate and all. these microcontrollers are really amazing things and i spent time for a detail study and got to kno bout the pins and its control. it was indeed exciting. now i guess the tough part is to find an IC...