Seasonal Greetings

20 December 2009 Tinkering
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This is definitively the last post for this year. So I wish everybody Merry Christmas or whatever you want to celebrate and a pleasant & successful new year! Even I stopped tinkering and went on to hacking cookies. Have fun & take care!

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Filtering Sensor Data with a Kalman Filter

18 December 2009 Tinkering
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Some days ago I wrote about noise with a LIS302DL accelerometer. There is obviously something wrong with my hardware. But before I get a new version out I need to implement some software filtering. After some unsuccessful results with low pass filters I choose the Kalman Filter. The Kalman Filter involves an awful lot of [...]

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Decoupling LIS302DL – There I fixed it!

15 December 2009 Tinkering
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As you probably know, I really like I2C sensors and especially the LIS302DL. But adding this accelerometer to your circuit is not as straight forward as I thought. But in the end I got it quite right. It all started out with a 0.1µF ceramic capacitor. For good measure I put a ferrite bead in [...]

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Arduino & Barometric Pressure Sensor BMP085

5 December 2009 Sensors
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In lack of any new projects (which are currently all in an very intermediate state) Interactive Matter presents yet another ‘how to connect a cool I2C sensor to Arduino’ post. This time it is all about pressure. The BMP085 pressure sensor combines a absolute barometric pressure sensor (aka barometer) with an temperature sensor. It is [...]

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Driving Circuits from a CR2032 Lithium Coin Cell

29 August 2009 Tinkering
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Just another good example of ‘lesson learned’. I often use the very common CR2032 coin cell batteries to drive my circuits. Small, cheap, easy to get and there is a quite a range of good and cheap battery holders. But recently I have tested an complete over the top design which pushed the poor little [...]

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Interactive Matter: The first year!

11 August 2009 Tinkering
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Unbelievable that this is just the first year of Interactive Matter. But still there happened a lot of things. Lets have a look on what Interactive Matter has managed to achieve.

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Arduino & AD7746

18 July 2009 Sensors
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In my ongoing series about cool sensors Interactive Matter presents the AD7746 capacity sensor: What is a capacity sensor good for? You can of course make a device to identify small capacitance (up to 4pF) but that’s boring. Much more interesting is how it reacts to touching. Read on how to connect it to the [...]

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Interactive Matter goes Kit

14 July 2009 Shop
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The questions for kits grow stronger and stronger in the comments. Therefore I am happy and proud to announce that Interactive Matter starts selling kits. The first will be the Space Invaders Button. The first round of prototypes has been packaged and already shipped: Soon we will add order forms and how to descriptions for [...]

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µTVBG – World Smallest TV-B-Gone clone

4 July 2009 Projects
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I really like TV-B-Gone by Mitch Altman. The idea to have an universal remote to switch off any TV set is just marvellous! But for some real sneaky operation I wanted a much smaller version which perfectly fits into my pocket. So how about a small experiment how small you can go (and still solder [...]

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Doing business with makepcb.com

17 June 2009 Tinkering
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Trying a new board house is always an adventure. Of course I use BatchPCB for small scale prototyping. But for an upcoming project I needed some higher quantity of boards for a cheaper price. So some ‘real’ board house must be found. There are so many options, that I do not try to list all [...]

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64 Pixels Roundup

20 May 2009 Tinkering
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As a effect of the Space Invaders Button I learned a lot about all those LED Matrix projects on the net. As a roundup I collected a short overview of all the different projects I found.

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SFH 3310 & SFH 5711 Light Sensors

18 May 2009 Sensors
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After I successfully shed some light its time to see some light. For this you normally use photo diodes, photo transistors or photo resistors. But there are two nice little detectors which I came across, special enough to post them here: The Osram SFH 3710 and SFH 5711. Both are photo diodes respectively transistors adapted [...]

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Low Voltage RGB LED

9 May 2009 Tinkering
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Most of my parts want a 3.3V voltage supply. Most of my projects relay on a single coin cell battery at 3V. But driving an RGB LED from 3V is no fun at all. Lets take for example a nice strong RGB LED like the Osram LRTB G6TG – the green channel runs at 3.2V, [...]

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Space Invaders Button

13 April 2009 Projects
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The reason I started all this microcontroller stuff was that I wanted to create an animated button displaying space invaders characters. Preferably the same size as an normal button (the ones you put on your jacket, not your panel). Now here it is: If you do not see the electronics for this small display read [...]

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My couch programmer

11 April 2009 Tinkering
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Some days ago I searched for an small USB-based AVR programmer. After some research I stumbled over an new old friend. The AvrUsb500 SMD from tuxgraphics.org: To make it short: It is a bit pricey but exactly what I was looking for. But read the full review after the click.

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Arduino & LIS302DL

13 February 2009 Sensors
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Ages ago I bought an LIS302DL from Sparkfun. One of the old (little bit) messed up ones, but still 3 axis accelerometer with I2C output. No external parts. No pain. Fine! Before I go in any further investigation. I need to get it up & running with my arduino (actually an boarduino – but who [...]

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