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by Bryan Bergeron, Editor
January 2010
Given the lax inspection policies of the FDA, I don’t have much faith in package labels. With the current economy, there’s simply too much pressure to skimp on ingredients or falsely elevate nutritional claims. I can’t prove it — I just don’t have the analytical tools on hand to determine the quantity of digestible protein in a fish stick or energy bar.
Typical chemical batteries just don’t cut it when a device needs to run for years without fail. Enter the betavoltaics, or tiny nuclear batteries that harvest energy from radioactive sources such as tritium. Now a company called Widetronix has developed new betavoltaics that can run for up to 25 years and perhaps power tiny devices in everything from military hardware to smartphone sensors.
Credit: Widetronix
This shoebox-sized powerhouse would make Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor proud. Like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, the robotic “Better Mousetrap” goes to the extreme to detect and destroy its target. “Many people have been trying to develop a ‘better mousetrap’ for years, so we decided to build one in the literal sense,” says its developer Jake Easton.
The Lux Spectralis is a deluxe RGB (red, green and blue) LED (light emitting diode) blinky that you can build. Soldering is required. You will need a soldering iron, some solder and a pair of wire cutters to assemble the kit. Not shown in the photo is the battery holder that holds 3 AAA cells, not supplied. A small microcontroller (Atmel AVR ATtiny13) is preprogrammed with many different display modes that you can select with a pushbutton.
Simple Step Motor Control
By Bryan Lai
SchmartBoard
Introduction
This project uses a PIC16F886 to drive a 5-wire step motor.
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