USB catapult

By martinm, in DIY, november 18,2011.

Do you remember throwing peas using a spoon when you were a kid, at the school cafeteria ? Well, we wanted to try it again, but this time in a more sophisticated and cleaner manner. The idea is to build a little catapult, remotely controlled by USB. For that, we used a YoctoServo, two RC servos and a few rubber bands. The rest is only a matter of mechanical design :-)

Birth of an USB module (part 3)

By mvuilleu, in Electronics, november 11,2011.

After the presentation of the design and prototyping of our products, here comes the production stage, with a new video!

In order to make the final printed board, we reuse the circuit of the last validated prototype and use panelization: the circuit is replicated a few dozens of times on a single larger board, in order to build as many modules as possible at once.

Our USB mailbox (You've Got Mail revisited)

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in DIY, november 05,2011.

This week, we will spend less time hacking and more time on the programming API, in particular on the use of USB modules from C++. The goal is to enhance our old mailbox in order to get a notification when the postman has come, in order to stay in the warm and get the mail as soon as it is here. Since this post is a bit longer than usual, if you feel lazy, feel free to skip straight to the end of the post and look at the video demo.

Outdor electronic projects

By martinm, in DIY, october 28,2011.

When we start thinking about an outdoor electronic project, some new problems appears. The worst one is humidity, everyone knows that electric stuff does not like water. Fortunately, there are ways to make an electric device work outdoor. This article explains some techniques to help you use Yoctopuce devices in the wild.

The USB Pumpkin in the Cloud

By martinm, in DIY, october 21,2011.

Getting into Halloween time, we thought it could be fun to show a Yocto-Color used within a pumpkin, and to use its RGB leds to change the pumpkin color. Nothing really special, actually. To make it a bit more challenging, we thought that it would look much better if we could have some kind of cloud floating around the pumpkin. Forget the small demo that we had originally planned, our pumpkin just bubbled into a big overkill...