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 →

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 →

Welcome to “Robot Boot Camp.” In this two-part article series, I’ll explain what you can do with a basic mobile machine, a few sensors, and behavioral programming techniques. Behavioral programming provides distinct advantages over other programming techniques. It is independent … Continue reading →

James Kim—a biomedical student at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada—recently submitted an update on the status of an interesting prosthetic arm design project. The design features a Freescale 9S12 microcontroller and a Microsoft Kinect, which tracks arm movements that are … Continue reading →