Tag: processing

PMT power supply

I was cleaning house a bit, and among my old files I found this, which might be worth sharing. Years ago I made a centralized power supply for a custom 2-photon imaging system I built. There were two…



Controlling a bunch of servos

A friend just asked a quick question: How can I make a bunch of cheap (not fast) laser shutters? Here’s a quick answer: For motors, servos are pretty easy to use. Put a piece of black…



Processing 2

One of the first posts in this blog was on Processing. Processing is a programming language with an integrated development environment that is specialized for simplicity– ease of learning and coding– and…



Introducing the Spectrino

The Open Hardware wave keeps rolling: MySpectral recently announced the Spectrino – an Arduino based spectrometer. It’s as barebones as spectrometers go, with the small enclosure containing a diffraction grating, CCD light sensor and…



Streamlined & simple prototyping to custom PCB

Fritzing is PCB design software (EDA) in the spirit of Arduino and Processing. It’s open source, cross-platform, streamlined, and simple to use. It doesn’t do simulations, but you can lay out your circuit in a GUI that looks like a prototyping board, then move…



Arduino – a simple microcontroller

Arduino is a popular, cheap (around 25 USD), and open source microcontroller platform. We use them all over the lab. Students can learn to program them very quickly, they’re versatile, and there is a…



Processing

Processing is a programming language geared towards visual artists, but it comes in handy for a lot of other purposes as well. Here are some of its finer points:

Open source
Integrated IDE (see below)
Lots of…