I’ve been playing with Sparkfun’s 4-Digit 7-Segment Display, of course connected to an Arduino. I recorded this short video to show how it works. I’m using the blue model which is very bright and visible indoor. Unfortunately, under direct sunlight doesn’t work well and requires a bit of shadow to be visible. In the video, I’m

During the past months, I held a workshop at the FabLab Torino teaching people how to design their own hardware using KiCAD. (workshop lessons archive) During the workshop, we designed LibreMote, a simple remote controller programmable just like an Arduino Pro Mini which has an integrated accelerometer and a joystick. This served us as a

During the past weekend, with the precious help of Franco Magni, we assembled the very first prototype of LibreMote v0.1, the simple remote controller programmable just like an Arduino Pro Mini which has an integrated accelerometer and a joystick, we developed during the electronics workshop I held at Fablab Torino. Here is a first video of LibreMote

Wow.. check out what just landed on KiCad developers mailing list! Thanks to the work of Thomas Spindler, we’ll soon see many improvements in KiCad’s 3D rendering tool.. Check it out!

The past Saturday me and Franco met up at Fablab Torino to solder the PN532 NFC/RFID breakout board from Adafruit/Microbuilder. This should be a pretty good learning platform to dig into NFC/RFID.. stay tuned for more on this… Btw, Franco had the nice idea of making a timelapse of the day.. here it is.. almost 6

Yesterday night, me and Federico Vanzati (one of the guys working for Officine Arduino at Fablab Torino) had a good time hacking the NFC shield by Adafruit so that it could work with the new Arduino Leonardo. The hacking started when we connected the Leonardo to the NFC and discovered that I2C, the default hardware communication bus used by

I only need to test each one of them.. ouch.. 🙂

I’m currently writing a paper for TEI 2013 about the FreeIMU and the FreeIMU library as well as all the prototyping they enable. The FreeIMU has been already used in quite some nice research/educational projects! Here are some: Enrico Calore et al. used FreeIMU to detect and correct horizon and keystone distortions due to improper camera orientation My

During the tests of the last FreeIMU v0.4.3 batch, which are now available for sale on our online shops, I found out that a faulty MS5611 lost its plastic white package allowing to see what’s inside of it.. I took a picture of it using my USB microscope, looks interesting! Unfortunately, I’ve been only able to shoot

I’ve recently had to hand solder a QFN64 package chip (CC430 microcontroller) on a PCB for a project. This was the first time I soldered a QFN this big, it turned out quite well.