For a long time, the space exploration has been the domain of governments .. and not all governments, but only the strong governments. Now, Arduino is playing big and launching open source experiments .. in space !
Recently, I’ve noticed a very interesting hardware project: Parallella, a low cost (99$ only!) pocket supercomputer packing a lots of computation power: it includes a Zynq chip (which contains a dual core ARM processor and an FPGA) and it also includes an Epiphany multicore chip.
It also features USB, Ethernet, HDMI and some GPIO pins, which make it like a kind of raspberry pi on steroids.
The artists from artsdesignblog.com found a nice and exotic use for the electronic components. Indeed a very creative use, and as an engineer in electronics myself, those remind of the increasing similarity between the machines and the living beings !
If you need a temperature sensor but don’t have one at hand, here’s an easy way to create one, using a .. diode ! All what you have to do is to bias the diode with a current around 1 mA, and to measure it’s forward voltage drop.
The forward voltage of a silicon diode varies with about -2 mV / °C. So, basically the diode itself can be used as a temperature sensor. In order to have a good precision, you should perform a calibration by measuring the output voltage at a known temperature.
The Bulgarian manufacturer Olimex has just released an open source low cost single board computer based on i.MX233 integrated circuit from Freescale.This board features a powerful ARM926J core running at 454 MHz, 64 MB RAM, one high speed USB host port, and even a PAL / NTSC video output. This board is able to run Linux from the SD card bringing you a powerful system at the cost of an 8-bit microcontroller development board.