About: Ibrar Ayyub

It was a few years ago that I first heard of a free site where you could draw and simulate designs. “What’s the point?” I thought. But, the idea is taking off. Was I wrong? I questioned the usefulness of this cloud concept because there had already long existed good, free circuit simulators. A quick […]

Abstract: The Atmega8 microcontroller from Atmel has plenty of digital and analog input/output lines. It is the ideal device to develop any kind of measurement equipment. In this article we see how to interconnect the microcontroller to a linux PC over a physical RS232 interface without the extra MAX232 chip. Introduction A pre-requisite for this […]

In this tutorial I’m going to be showing you how you can send voltage values to your pc using a Pic chip, Wiimote, and Autoit3 scripting language. The process works by wiring a pic chip to the button pads of a wiimote. Then using the pic chips Analog to Digital Converter, we obtain a 10bit binary […]

Hysteresis can be added to a comparator circuit to improve its stability, especially when the input signal is noisy. In this post, we will examine the hysteresis characteristics of some common comparator and Op Amps using an oscilloscope. Perhaps the most intuitive way to visualize the hysteresis in a circuit is to plot the input […]

Using a hybrid silica sol-gel material and self-assembled monolayers of a common fatty acid, researchers have developed a new capacitor dielectric material that provides an electrical energy storage capacity rivaling certain batteries, with both a high energy density and high power density. If the material can be scaled up from laboratory samples, devices made from […]

Team Members Amanda Care (Senior in Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern University) Eric Nickel (Graduate Student in Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, BS in Biomedical Engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering) James Yeung (Junior in Electrical Engineering, Northwestern University) Overview The “Programmable Stiffness Joint” is a device which is able to internally modify the rotational stiffness of […]

Intro This is my first Instructable so I’m sorry for mistakes. Critics are always welcome 🙂 So in this project I made a development board for PIC16F1787. Now most of you guys aren’t familiar with this particular model. Some might even think why I chose 16Fxxxx series IC when I could have easily used 18Fxxxx […]

The LTC®3807 is a high performance step-down switching regulator DC/DC controller that drives an all N-channel synchronous power MOSFET stage. A constant frequency current mode architecture allows a phase-lockable frequency of up to 750kHz. The 50μA no-load quiescent current extends operating run time in battery-powered systems. OPTI-LOOP® compensation allows the transient response to be optimized […]

In Tutorial 4, we learnt interfacing an HD44780-based LCD to a chipKIT board for displaying alphanumeric output. Today, we will see how to connect a NOKIA 5110 graphical LCD (used in Nokia 5110 cell phones), which is a 84×48 pixel monochrome display of about 1.5″ diagonal in size. The display can be used for graphics, text, and bitmaps. Theory Nokia […]

This is a simple WiFI Smoke Detector that texts me when it senses smoke. I made this for my battery storage area in case of a lithium polymer fire. I still have all of my regular smoke detectors installed and I don’t suggest relying only on this, but rather as an extra layer of protection. […]