Padmal's BLOG

If you have ever had experience in hand soldering a printed circuit board with surface mount components, you would know how tricky it is to place the right component at right place. One cannot take forever to place the components as the solder paste is drying up too. I remember the first time I tried to hand solder one of the first PSLab prototypes, I printed an enlarged version of the front silk screen and used color pencils to group different resistors and capacitors. So that I will not mess it up. Getting back to the real topic, I used KiCAD to design PSLab circuits. KiCAD is open source and it has a Python interface (libraries ...). So there are many open source projects doing cool stuff with KiCAD PCBs and I found the one I was eagerly looking for months. Interactive HTML BoM InteractiveHtmlBom  is an open source library we can just download and run out of the box. Keep in mind that, it would need the necessary KiCAD python stuff installed already. What this library does is, it re

Crazyflie 2.0 is a lightweight micro aerial vehicle. This open source platform comes with a variety of decks to support multiple implementations. One of them is a Obstacle Avoidance Deck by the original manufacturer itself. This deck supports five Time of Flight (ToF) sensors mounted as shown in figure below. Our project is requires sensor readings captured using these ToF sensors. Effectiveness and accuracy of our algorithms require more data points than points provided by just five sensors. There are no other hardware platforms available in the Internet supporting more ToF sensors and the alternative we had was to develop one on our own. Researching into existing hardware platform, we were able to extend the design to build a custom deck that supports 13 ToF sensors mounted facing different angles. The schematics and bill of materials can be found from this repository hosted online: https://github.com/CloudyPadmal/CrazyFlieToFDeck Designing the hardware

MPLab to Program the PSLab   MPLab© X IDE Microchip® is a famous company for PIC® microcontroller manufacturing. This American based company produces a variety of electronic components ranging from basic microcontrollers, EEPROMs, SRAMs, RF devices and many more. In the PSLab device by FossAsia, we use a PIC24EP256GP204 who's data sheet can be found from here . Apart from the high performing micro controllers, Microchip provides a powerful IDE to program these devices. This IDE is based on NetBeans IDE. The programming language is consists of C++ syntaxes and we can embed assembly commands like 'nop' to simplify the code. Documentation and guidelines on how to use this great IDE is available on their official web site . Here we're going to see how to install this in an Ubuntu 16.04 64bit PC. Installing MPLab© X IDE Step I To install this software, first we have to download the tar ball containing the installer. The latest version can be found from the

Pololu - QTR-8RC Reflectance Sensor Array In line following a sensor array is an essential part in the robot. I have used the QTR-8RC array and it works like a charm. With Arduino libraries it is easy to configure them but with PIC micro-controllers you have to handle the hardware configuration part manually.