Location: Menlo Park, CA Education: BS and MS, University of Utah Occupation: Software Developer Member Status: John has been a subscriber since 2002. Technical Interests: His interests include user interfaces for embedded systems, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development, and embedded … Continue reading →

How do you clean a clean-energy generating system? With a microcontroller (and a few other parts, of course). An excellent example is US designer Scott Potter’s award-winning, Renesas RL78 microcontroller-based Electrostatic Cleaning Robot system that cleans heliostats (i.e., solar-tracking mirrors) … Continue reading →

Ready for the Pi-Face Digital? What’s that? you ask. Pi Interface Digital, or Pi-Face Digital, is a Raspberry Pi accessory board Premier Farnell will begin distributing in early 2013. You can plug it into a Raspberry Pi and start designing … Continue reading →

I designed a microcontroller-based mobile robot that can cruise on its own, avoid obstacles, escape from inadvertent collisions, and track a light source. In the first part of this series, I introduced my TOMBOT robot’s hardware. Now I’ll describe its … Continue reading →

Ready to start a low-power or energy-monitoring microcontroller-based design project? You’re in luck. We’re featuring eight award-winning, green energy-related designs that will help get your creative juices flowing. The projects listed below placed at the top of Renesas’s RL78 Green … Continue reading →