Author: wrd_admin

A major part of the final year of Engineering at Waterloo is the Fourth Year Design Project.  For the project students form groups of four and see an engineering solution from initial design to the prototype phase.  Some of these are ideas become startup companies after the students graduate (BufferBox and Pebble are some recent successful examples).

My Fourth Year Project is a modular robotics kit that tries to bring together the mechanical, electrical and software aspects of robotics while allowing different skilled users flexibility.  See Bread and Butter for more details and progress updates.

My role with the team is the Electrical Lead, focusing on the design and support for the electrical aspects of the project.  One of the major tasks was the creation of custom PCBs for the project, the first printed prototypes are seen below.

I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi the other day to play with.  I have worked with small Linux devices before but have never had a dev board of my own.  So far I have only briefly used it, I set up an Apache server and tested the GPIO pins to see how they worked.  Overall I am happy with the board, and hope to make some interesting projects with it.  Below is a simple test setup I did, with GPIO driving LEDs and reading in a switch.  For this setup I moved away from using the keyboard and mouse attached and SSH-ed in.

I recently acquired a few Nixie Tubes, which are old Russian numeric displays.  I built a first prototype to see if my method of using a decade counter with switching transistors would work.  One thing about these tubes is that they require high voltages, I am running them at around 110V DC in the video below.  Hopefully I will post more details on this project in the future.

A while back I was experimenting with getting LEDs to work with music.  At the time I didn’t want to make a complex colour organ, so I instead found a method using a few transistors.  Once the project was done I created an instructable, since I had used the site for a lot of inspiration before. http://www.instructables.com/id/Blinking-LEDs-to-Music .