Category Archives: pic32

Touch-A-Sketch Gives an Old Toy a New Twist

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After nearly 60 years and a lot of stairs and squares, there is finally an easier way to draw on an Etch A Sketch®. For their final project in embedded microcontroller class, [Serena, Francis, and Alejandro] implemented a motor-driven solution that takes input from a touch screen.

Curves are a breeze to draw with a stylus instead of joysticks, but it’s still a 2-D plotter and must be treated as such. The Touch-A-Sketch system relies on the toy’s stylus starting in the lower left hand corner, so all masterpieces must begin at (0,0) on the knobs and the touch screen. …read more

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Balance like a Mountain Goat on this Simple Stewart Platform

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No goats were harmed in the making of this 3-DOF Stewart platform for [Bruce Land]’s microcontrollers course at Cornell.

If the name “Stewart platform” doesn’t ring a bell, the video below will help you out. [Team Microgoats] built a small version of the mechanical system commonly seen in flight simulators, opting for 3 DOF  to simplify the design. Their PIC32-controlled steppers can wobble and weave the table in response to inputs from an MPU-6050 six-axis accelerometer embedded in the base of a 3D-printed goat. Said goat appears to serve no other role in the build, but goats are cool, so …read more

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An Automated Ice Cream Topper For The Ultimate In Zero Effort Desserts

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It’s a highly personal facet of the eating experience, the choice of topping applied to your frozen dessert. Everybody has their own preferences when it comes to whipped cream, sprinkles, and chocolate syrup. Should the maintenance of those preferences become a chore, there is a machine for that, and it comes courtesy of [Kristen Vilcans] and [Ramita Pinsuwannakub] in the form of their Cornell University project as students of [Bruce Land]. Their Automated Ice Cream Topper holds profiles for each registered user, and dispenses whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and candy sprinkles onto ice cream at the simple push of a …read more

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An Automated Ice Cream Topper For The Ultimate In Zero Effort Desserts

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It’s a highly personal facet of the eating experience, the choice of topping applied to your frozen dessert. Everybody has their own preferences when it comes to whipped cream, sprinkles, and chocolate syrup. Should the maintenance of those preferences become a chore, there is a machine for that, and it comes courtesy of [Kristen Vilcans] and [Ramita Pinsuwannakub] in the form of their Cornell University project as students of [Bruce Land]. Their Automated Ice Cream Topper holds profiles for each registered user, and dispenses whipped cream, chocolate sauce, and candy sprinkles onto ice cream at the simple push of a …read more

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POV Display is FAN-tastic

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Persistence-of-vision displays come in all shapes and sizes. But when you get a couple of [Bruce Land’s] students involved, well let’s just say they tend to up the ante. When [Emily] and [Han] decided to make a POV display for their next class project, they did so with style. Unsatisfied with smaller displays they saw on YouTube – they decided to make a larger one out of an old box fan and a DotStar LED strip, which are similar to NeoPixels except they use SPI, which means you can update the LEDs at a much faster rate. This makes them …read more

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A Robot Arm for Virtual Beer Pong

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Leave it to engineering students to redefine partying. [Hyun], [Justin], and [Daniel] have done exactly that for their final project by building a virtually-controlled robotic arm that plays beer pong.

There are two main parts to this build: a sleeve worn by the user, and the robotic arm itself. The sleeve has IMUs at the elbow and wrist and a PIC32 that calculates their respective angles. The sleeve sends angle data to a second PIC32 where it is translated it into PWM signals and sent to the arm.

There’s a pressure sensor wired sleeve-side that’s worn between forefinger and thumb …read more

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Guitar Game Plays with Enhanced Realism

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There’s a lot more to learning how to play the guitar than just playing the right notes at the right time and in the right order. To produce any sound at all requires learning how to do completely different things with your hands simultaneously, unless maybe you’re a direct descendant of Eddie Van Halen and thus born to do hammer ons. There’s a bunch of other stuff that comes with the territory, like stringing the thing, tuning it, and storing it properly, all of which can be frustrating and discouraging to new players. Add in the calluses, and it’s no …read more

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Guitar Game Plays with Enhanced Realism

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There’s a lot more to learning how to play the guitar than just playing the right notes at the right time and in the right order. To produce any sound at all requires learning how to do completely different things with your hands simultaneously, unless maybe you’re a direct descendant of Eddie Van Halen and thus born to do hammer ons. There’s a bunch of other stuff that comes with the territory, like stringing the thing, tuning it, and storing it properly, all of which can be frustrating and discouraging to new players. Add in the calluses, and it’s no …read more

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Smart Station Runs Entertainment, Is Entertainment

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It’s that special time of year—time for the parade of student projects from [Bruce Land]’s embedded microcontroller design course at Cornell. [Timothy], [Dhruv], and [Shaurya] are all into remote sensing and control applications, so they built a smart station that combines audiovisual entertainment with environmental sensing.

As with the other projects in this course, the smart station is built on a PIC32 dev board. It does Bluetooth audio playback via RN-52 module and has a beat-matching light show in the form of a NeoPixel ring mounted atop the 3D-printed enclosure. But those blinkenlights aren’t just there to party. They also …read more

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Fully-functional Oscilloscope on a PIC

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When troubleshooting circuits it’s handy to have an oscilloscope around, but often we aren’t in a lab setting with all of our fancy, expensive tools at our disposal. Luckily the price of some basic oscilloscopes has dropped considerably in the past several years, but if you want to roll out your own solution to the “portable oscilloscope” problem the electrical engineering students at Cornell produced an oscilloscope that only needs a few knobs, a PIC, and a small TV.

[Junpeng] and [Kevin] are taking their design class, and built this prototype to be inexpensive and portable while still maintaining a …read more

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