Arduino Projects
Thermostat
This one was fun to do. I designed a PCB for some solid state relays so that the Arduino could control fan motors and a heater to act as a thermostat. It obviously had a temperature sensor, and it even had wireless control!
Bike Trailer
A smart bike trailer with speed sensor, turn signals, and Bluetooth connection to the Android app I made.
Line Following Car
Designed a full car using PCB design tools to interface with Arduino Uno board to control the car. The car has IR sensors, power regulation, battery management, motor control in one package.
Here is a video of my PCB for an LED array, placing parts, and reflow soldering. This is an Arduino driven 8x8 array of NeoPixels on a PCB I designed on PCBWeb Designer, ordered through OrderPCBs.com, and parts from digikey.com. Thank you Arduino, Adafruit, Gopro, EEweb.com, BSU, Make:
With all of the news about Mars lately, I thought the NASA 3D printable Curiosity rover model http://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/mars-rover-curiosity was really cool, but wanted to give it a little extra something. Looking around the office, I realized I had almost everything I needed to make a sensing and moving rover using the NASA 3D printed file of the Curiosity.
The NASA Curiosity rover is an amazing machine, and having one of my own to play with and modify has been a lot of fun. I have yet to see a 3D model of the rovers used in “The Martian” but I look forward to doing something similar with that one too.
I race a simulator for R/C cars called VRC Pro (Virtual Radio Control). It is a very faithful and complex simulation of R/C car racing. The sim allows you to use your real life radio control transmitter and receiver by the use of a dongle that plugs into the USB port of your computer. Unfortunately, the official VRC dongle went out of production due to permanent supply issues: https://www.vrcworld.com/news.aspx?type=none&y=2019&m=1&id=1833
So no official dongles were available anymore, and even some of the 3rd party adapters went out of stock, like the MHW and 9-turbo. VRC did team up with 9-turbo to sell them for 60 Euros after some time: https://www.vrcworld.com/eshop/product.aspx?241 . With all the delays and costs a DIY option was looking good, just in case I need a replacement for my older original VRC dongle.