Ultrasonic Parking Aid

Parking your vehicle in a narrow space is always a risk. This parking aid project from Cornell university students will help you to prevent your Mercedes from getting scratched while parking in a tight space. This ultrasonic ParKontroller can sense how far you are away from the wall or a hidden object behind your car and warn you visually and audibly using LEDs and speaker respectively.

The students use the principles of Sound Navigation and Ranging (SONAR) technique in this design. This principle is used for finding the distance and direction of a remote object underwater by transmitting sound waves and detecting reflections from it. First, a series of short ultrasonic pulses are transmitted using a transducer that changes voltage into sound waves.

Source: http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects/s2007/jjl49_mar97/jjl49_mar97/index_files/image022.jpg

This parking aid device can detect an object within a range of 40cm with accuracy of 1cm in the distance interval of 15 to 40cm. For more details, visit: Ultrasonic Parking Aid.

LCD Thermometer using Atmega8 and LM35.

Atmega8 is a popular 8-bit microcontroller from ATMEL. It has 8KB self-programming Flash Program Memory, 1KB SRAM, 512 Byte EEPROM, 6 or 8 Channel 10-bit A/D-converter. Up to 16 MIPS throughput at 16 Mhz. 2.7 - 5.5 Volt operation. The LM35 of National Semiconductors that is used in this project is a precision centigrade temperature sensor, which has an analog output voltage. It has a range of -55ºC to +150ºC and a accuracy of ±0.5ºC . The output voltage is 10mV/ºC . The output voltage is converted by the AD convertor of the AT Mega8. The temperature is displayed on an LCD module.


For circuits and software, CLICK HERE.

ATtiny 2313 Development Board

ATtiny2313 is a successor of the 1200 and is designed to address the requirements of battery operated and portable applications by offering low power consumption and a high level of system integration in a small package. Here is a development board for the beginners.For PCB and Programming software, Click HERE.

Make your own Variable DC Power Supply

A variable DC power supply is the most useful tool on a hobbyist's workbench, because different electronics projects sometime require different DC supply. National semiconductor's LM350 IC can provide a variable DC voltage ranging from 1.25 to 33V with the use of just two external resistors. It can provide current up to 3.0A if properly heat-sinked.

This project uses a LM350 IC to generate a variable DC voltage from 1.25-18V. My finished product looks like this.

For more details about this project, visit this.

Interface 16x2 LCD to a PIC microcontroller using C

Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) are more convenient ways of displaying output results in any microcontroller based projects. If you are new to microcontroller interfacing, and want to learn how to interface a LCD to a PIC microcontroller you need to look at this. Here you will find PIC16F628A interfacing with a 16x2 LCD display and the programming is done in mikroC.

The objective of this experiment is to interface a 16x2 LCD to PIC16F628A in 4-bit mode. This means the data transfer

will use only four pins of the microcontroller. There is no additional hardware setup needed for this experiment, as we have a ready-made LCD interface female ......
Click here for more details.