Any good engineer likes it when life throws the conditions their way for a great experiment, and life has just thrown me several all at once. I have a six-year-old son, a two-year-old son, a six-month-old daughter, and until recently, a two-parent household. I’m not used to being a single dad of three, but myRead more
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In my first blog post on communicating with the Altera Cyclone II FPGA, I demonstrated how to create a serial echo by simply connecting the Tx wire and the Rx wire together. Then in my second post I demonstrated how to use third-party libraries and a clock to allow that serial line to be translated into a byteRead more
I finally got another free evening to devote to reverse engineering the Can-Am Spyder diagnostic interface. For the back story, see part 1 here. But things did not quite work out like I hoped for tonight’s Spyder hacking. As usual, it is the hardware guy’s fault. First order of business was to build another cableRead more
Every year, I try to volunteer at the VEX Robotics World Championship. This year I volunteered as a Field Technician. When the field or robots have trouble connecting or technical issues, I was there to help troubleshoot the problem. As an added bonus, a robotics team that I mentor called the DiscoBots also competed in the event.Read more
SolidWorks is a great tool for designing mechanical parts and assemblies, but I find myself using it as a marketing tool fairly often as well. Whether it is needed for proposals, presentations or just visualizing a new project, I’m often asked “can you just make it look real?”. Luckily when using off the shelf components,Read more