Collaborate Disseminate
Seeing the unseen is one of the great things about using an infrared (IR) camera, and even the cheap-ish ones that plug into a smartphone can dramatically improve your hardware …read more Continue reading Lock-In Thermography on a Cheap IR Camera
We’re all familiar with getting feedback from a rotating shaft, for which we usually employ a potentiometer or encoder. But there’s another device that, while less well-known, has some advantages …read more Continue reading Not a Pot, Not an Encoder: Exploring Synchros for Rotational Sensing
[Mark Smith] must really, really like his coffee, at least judging by how much effort he’s put into tricking out his espresso machine. This inductive water tank sensor is part …read more Continue reading Extreme Espresso, Part 2: An Inductive Water Level Sensor
In this day and age where a megabyte of memory isn’t a big deal, it is hard to recall when you had to conserve every byte of memory. If you are a student of such things, you might enjoy an annotated view of the Apollo 11 DSKY sine and cosine …read more
We are always excited when we see [Hamster] post an FPGA project, because it is usually something good. His latest post doesn’t disappoint and shows how he uses the CORDIC algorithm to generate very precise sine and cosine waves in VHDL. CORDIC (Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer; sometimes known as Volder’s algorithm) is a standard way to compute hyperbolic and trigonometric functions. What’s nice is that the algorithm only requires addition, subtraction, bit shifts, and a lookup table with an entry for each bit of precision you want. Of course, if you have addition and negative numbers, you already have subtraction. …read more