Coming next week: the March issue of Circuit Cellar in both print and digital. Here’s a sneak peek: Condition monitoring for factories, air quality monitoring project, panel PCs, DIY EMFI tool project, Flex PCB services roundup, I2S, touchscreen IR remote project. This 84-page magazine cooks up a tasty spread of embedded technology articles for you to digest.
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Here’s a sneak preview of March 2022 Circuit Cellar:
MONITORING IN A CONNECTED WORLD
Condition Monitoring for the Factory
By Jeff Child
Preventative maintenance has huge cost saving implications for factory production line systems. Box-level embedded system vendors have developed condition monitoring solutions that enable equipment maintenance or replacement to be performed preemptively. Circuit Cellar Chief Editor Jeff Child looks at the latest technology trends and products relevant to these applications.
Build a Long-Term DAQ System (Part 1)
By Anuj Rajappa
In edge DAQ devices, the amount data logged can span months or even years. In this project article, Anuj sets up a Wi-Fi-connected data server, so that data collection can be managed easily—with storage space scaled up as needed. Part 1 covers the project overview and hardware design details.
Home Air Quality Monitoring (Part 3): Web Server App
By Raul Alvarez-Torrico
Raul wraps up his 3-part article series on building a home air quality monitoring system. In Part 3, he discusses the web server application that receives data from the Android device and stores them in a database. It also has a web page that displays graphically air quality sensor data.
RESOURCES FOR EMBEDDED ENGINEERING
Datasheet: Panel PCs
By Jeff Child
Panel PCs are a category of display systems that are meant to be mounted on a factory wall or on the side of an industrial machine. And rather than simply being a display, panel PCs embed complete single board computing functionality, providing a complete embedded solution. This Datasheet section updates readers on these technology trends and provides a product gallery of representative panel PCs.
Using I2S to Transfer Digital Data (Part 1)
By Jeff Bachiochi
In this multi-part article, Jeff looks at I2S—a serial protocol that uses four control lines to send dual analog samples between devices. In Part 1, he gives an overview of the protocol and begins his I2S project building the input side of an I2S-based recording instrument.
Flex PCB Services
By Jeff Child
Flexible (Flex) PCBs aren’t new, but they are a critical part of many of today’s challenging embedded system applications—from wearable devices to mobile healthcare electronics. PCB production service vendors feature a variety of Flex PCB services to help bring your embedded system design from prototype to production. This roundup summarizes the services available today and whose providing them
Build Your Own EMFI Tool
By Colin O’Flynn
If you just want to experiment with EMFI attacks, a commercial product might be overkill. With that in mind, Colin steps you through how to craft your own DIY EMFI tool. Called PicoEMP, it uses relatively simple digital logic driven from a Raspberry Pi Pico board.
MICROCONTROLLERS DOING IT ALL
Build a Torsion Pendulum: Using an 8-bit PIC MCU
By Dev Gualtieri
Ever since the era when candles were first affixed to Christmas trees, our holidays have been enhanced by technology. LED lights now replace candles and there exist many electronic ornaments for decorating both house and lawn. In this project article, Dev uses an 8-bit PIC MCU to build a holiday decoration based on a magnetically-driven torsion pendulum.
Build a Touchscreen IR Remote: Using an ESP32 MCU
By Brian Millier
Many of today’s TV/media multi-function remotes are needlessly complicated—crammed with too many buttons. Based on an ESP32-based touchscreen module, Brian set out to design and build his ideal version of an IR remote that shows a digital touchscreen representation for each device it controls.
Make a Stochastic Music Generator: PIC32-Based Design
By William Salcedo, Rishi Singhal and Raghav Kumar
Collaborating on projects remotely has become a routine situation during the pandemic. Learn how these three Cornell students built a stochastic music generator on a PIC32 MCU using a remote lab system. The music generator uses MIDI files as an input and uses Zoom to perform songs inspired by the input data. data.
