Getting started with the Particle Photon

Posted on by mrsoltys
I love using all flavors of Arduino in the engineering classes I teach. They're great tools, and students do some truly awesome stuff with them. More and more, students want to build connected devices.  This used to require an expensive WiFi shield or Ethernet shield, or require the students to switch to developing on a Raspberry Pi. Enter the particle Photon:...Read More

Poormans Nest

Posted on by mrsoltys
[caption id="attachment_1616" align="alignright" width="300"] Ok, for sure not as sexy as the NEST[/caption] I start a lot of projects and never finish them. So in the spirit of documenting where I've been, here's my Poorman's Nest.  Here I'm using one of my Microview's I had laying around A potentiometer (on pin A0) A small digital temperature sensor (on pin 3)...Read More

$100 Quadcopter: The Sensor! MPU6050 6-axis IMU

Posted on by mrsoltys
[caption id="attachment_1515" align="alignleft" width="300"] My MPU6050 connected to my redboard[/caption] I bought this $30 triple axis accelerometer from sparkfun... The first thing we have to do is get it working! Wire it up. The MPU6050 uses a method of communication called IC2. I'm not an expert on this, but this is what you'll need to connect to an arduino uno  to...Read More

Project (In Progress): The $100 Quadcopter

Posted on by mrsoltys
I've always wanted to build a quadcopter, and I've got some free time so over the next couple months I'm going to try to build one from scratch.  Sure, there are a lot of tutorials out there on how to build them, but many come with pre-packaged controls and are basically just buying the right parts and assembling them. [caption...Read More