Variable Power Supply *Update

I finally received the PCBs for the variable power supply I mentioned in a previous post. After spending part of the weekend soldering and testing the board, it’s finally done! Here are some pictures:

ATMEGA32U4 PCB

I’m currently working on a project that requires a stand-alone microcontroller as the “brain” of the system. A few weeks ago I designed the PCB and sent it to get manufactured. It finally arrived and I was able to test it. So far everything functions well.

Battery Management System *UPDATE

As promised, here’s the rest of the code for the battery management system. The BMS now reads the voltage of each battery cell and balances each cell until the battery voltage across all cells is closely matched; +/-0.03V.

I also included a box with a switch and an LCD display. Some extra components are included such as a small trimmer potentiometer to adjust the LCD brightness, DIP switch with 4 contacts, toggle switch to turn power-off and on and a box to store the components.

This is what the new setup looks like:




And here’s the result:

1.This is the starting position of the 4 lithium batteries.

2. Then the batteries begin to discharge.

3. And at the end, the battery voltages are closely matched.

Here’s the new code:

Arduino Game Controller

Something I did a a few years ago; a game controller that uses an accelerometer and push buttons to emulate keyboard commands and can be used to play simpler games such as Need For Speed or other racing types.

The controller uses a .java application programmed in Processing (http://processing.org/) which simulates key strokes depending on the data received from the Arduino microcontroller. Later I was able to use an Arduino library (http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/PS2Keyboard) that eliminated the use of the Processing application. The controller became a plug-and-play type, without the need of additional software. I might post the code here soon.