This Notice Board is quite smart. It is a re-purposed unused old LCD monitor. The messages to be displayed on the notice board ( an old LCD monitor) can be sent from any mobile phone. The user should also provide an authentication code for the message to be displayed. The video below shows it.
Category: Projects
This curtain controller uses a microcontroller to control the opening of curtain veils, thus enabling the control of light intensity in the room. It features both automatic mode and manual override mode. In the automatic mode, we can set the preferred intensity level in the room using a pot and the control system will adjust the veils suitably to maintain the user set intensity level always. As the name indicates, in the manual override mode the user is free to choose any opening of the veils.
Circuit Diagram
Chippu has now upgraded its hardware, and is now much smarter. The Atmega32 is replaced by a more powerful and feature rich Atmega128 based Wiring Board. It has 53 I/O pins, 8 analog inputs, 2 hardware serial ports, 6 PWM (analog outputs), SPI, TWI, 8 external interrupts pins. Also it can drive a maximum of 24 servo motors. Quite impressive. A motor control board based on L293D was also added. Here are a few shots.
Chippu has easily learnt to recognize human speech. It uses Julius for speech recognition as explained in the previous post. The following video shows the speech recognition abilities of chippu.
Speech recognition in Linux is generally considered tough, but it can be done with very good results. Julian is a special version of Julius which performs grammar based speech recognition. The video shows the the speech recognition in action.
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As we can see, there occurs no error in the recognition of sentences.
Lately i was busy in the hardware design of a personal robot named Chippu. It is an open source project and runs ROS, the same powerful code framework that runs on many robots like PR2. It is made as economical as possible. At present there is no on-board processing and it is done in a remote computer. But in near future, Chippu will shift to something like a beagleboard.
Chippu
I built a small robot to detect an object using image processing techniques and when the object is found, it goes near to it and picks it up.
One of the most important things you must have to get into microcontroller programming is a good programmer. AVR microcontrollers are programmed using its SPI port. So the simplest AVR programmers are the direct parallel port or serial port programmers, in which SPI protocol is bitbanged using the serial port or parallel port. But modern PCs and laptops does not have parallel ports and serial ports. They only have USB ports. So here comes the role of USB based programmers. One of the simplest USB based programmer is USBASP. It uses an Atmega 8 and a few passive components, and is well supported in Linux, Windows ans Mac. More details of the USBASP can be found here.
USBASP
Self Parking is a automatic parking system found in modern cars. It makes use of various sensors like cameras, sonars, infrared rangefinders etc. to gather information about the surroundings of a car and then use complex processing algorithms to park the car without the help of the driver. It is different from parking assistant systems which helps the actual human driver by providing information about the surroundings. Automatic parking is thus a marvel which we are going to see in almost all the cars of tomorrow. Automatic parking is less error prone than human and can make better utilization of scarce and tight parking spaces.
The self parking car
Rear view
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