H-Bridge Tutorial

Typical transistor based H-Bridge circuit.

The H-bridge is a circuit used in electronic control of high current devices, particularly where the device polarity may be reversed, e.g. DC motors. The name comes from the fact that the circuit typically looks like a letter "H".


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How not to build a RepRap

A fairly standard basic RepRap

Actually I have a working RepRap now so it isn't all bad, but there are plenty (too many?) guides about what to do to make a RepRap, I thought I'd just point out the problems and mistakes I made building mine.


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BeagleBone un-boxing and hands-on review

A photo of the BeagleBone board plugged in

The new BeagleBone from Texas Instruments is here! Farnell sent me a review copy this week, and are taking orders. I've prepared a video intro about getting up and running with the new board which is really easy. A few of the highlights are in the review below.


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ChipKIT: Conway's Game of Life on VGA, now with more colours

A photo of the screen with the improved game of Life running with colour indicating age.

If you haven't already, check out my ChipKIT implementation of Conway's Game of Life because I'm not explaining all that again! In this version there are some subtle changes to it that make it more pretty to watch, although arguably more confusing to see what's going on.


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ChipKIT: Conway's Game of Life on VGA

A photo of the game being played out on a monitor.

After the success of the ChipKIT pong demo I started to think about the ways to improve the graphics output and came up with the idea of a coarse pixel display. This is a more traditional pixel based display where a rigid grid is displayed on the screen rather than the more vector based display that I had used previously. This demands more of the CPU time because it has to copy the pixels to the display manually as there is no DMA on the UNO32, rather than only having to display the colour for a tiny fraction of each display line like the pong game did.

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