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Marcus

BMP085 Barometric Pressure Sensor Breakout Boards arrived!

17 February 2010 Shop
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You may know that I played around a bit with the BMP085 barometric pressure sensor. Now I am proud to announce that the BMP085 barometric pressure sensor is available as breakout board in the Interactive Matter Shop.

The BMP085 Breakout Board is a limited offer. I just got some at hand and supplies last as long [...]

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Blinken Button – The LED Matrix Button Kit

7 February 2010 Shop
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Interactive Matter proudly present the first Interactive Matter SMT Kit
The Blinken Button! Head over to the shop to grab yours!

The Blinken Button is a kit for a 8×8 LED Matrix button (the jacket one). It is based on the Space Invaders Button you may already know. Get all the information on the product page.

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Palo Altona – Hamburg Tinker Drinkup

14 January 2010 Tinkering
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Die deutsche Version gibt es nach dem Klick (und dann weiter unten).
This time it is all non-technical (technically not – but that starts to get complicated). To further encourage tinkering in Hamburg, Alex and I have established a regularly tinker drinkup every Thursday (nearly) at Saal II.

Currently it is a very cosy drinkup, just a [...]

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Seasonal Greetings

20 December 2009 Tinkering
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This is definitively the last post for this year. So I wish everybody Merry Christmas or whatever you want to celebrate and a pleasant & successful new year!

Even I stopped tinkering and went on to hacking cookies. Have fun & take care!

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Filtering Sensor Data with a Kalman Filter

18 December 2009 Tinkering
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Some days ago I wrote about noise with a LIS302DL accelerometer. There is obviously something wrong with my hardware. But before I get a new version out I need to implement some software filtering.

After some unsuccessful results with low pass filters I choose the Kalman Filter. The Kalman Filter involves an awful lot of complicated [...]

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Decoupling LIS302DL – There I fixed it!

15 December 2009 Tinkering
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As you probably know, I really like I2C sensors and especially the LIS302DL. But adding this accelerometer to your circuit is not as straight forward as I thought. But in the end I got it quite right.

It all started out with a 0.1µF ceramic capacitor. For good measure I put a ferrite bead in front. [...]

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Arduino & Barometric Pressure Sensor BMP085

5 December 2009 Sensors
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In lack of any new projects (which are currently all in an very intermediate state) Interactive Matter presents yet another ‘how to connect a cool I2C sensor to Arduino’ post.
This time it is all about pressure. The BMP085 pressure sensor combines a absolute barometric pressure sensor (aka barometer) with an temperature sensor. It is build [...]

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Driving Circuits from a CR2032 Lithium Coin Cell

29 August 2009 Tinkering
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Just another good example of ‘lesson learned’. I often use the very common CR2032 coin cell batteries to drive my circuits. Small, cheap, easy to get and there is a quite a range of good and cheap battery holders.

But recently I have tested an complete over the top design which pushed the poor little CR2032 [...]

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Interactive Matter: The first year!

11 August 2009 Tinkering
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Unbelievable that this is just the first year of Interactive Matter. But still there happened a lot of things.

Lets have a look on what Interactive Matter has managed to achieve.

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Arduino & AD7746

18 July 2009 Sensors
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In my ongoing series about cool sensors Interactive Matter presents the AD7746 capacity sensor:

What is a capacity sensor good for? You can of course make a device to identify small capacitance (up to 4pF) but that’s boring. Much more interesting is how it reacts to touching.
Read on how to connect it to the Arduino and [...]

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Interactive Matter goes Kit

14 July 2009 Shop
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The questions for kits grow stronger and stronger in the comments. Therefore I am happy and proud to announce that Interactive Matter starts selling kits. The first will be the Space Invaders Button. The first round of prototypes has been packaged and already shipped:

Soon we will add order forms and how to descriptions for all [...]

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µTVBG – World Smallest TV-B-Gone clone

4 July 2009 Projects
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I really like TV-B-Gone by Mitch Altman. The idea to have an universal remote to switch off any TV set is just marvellous! But for some real sneaky operation I wanted a much smaller version which perfectly fits into my pocket. So how about a small experiment how small you can go (and still solder [...]

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Doing business with makepcb.com

17 June 2009 Tinkering
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Trying a new board house is always an adventure. Of course I use BatchPCB for small scale prototyping. But for an upcoming project I needed some higher quantity of boards for a cheaper price. So some ‘real’ board house must be found. There are so many options, that I do not try to list all [...]

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64 Pixels Roundup

20 May 2009 Tinkering
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As a effect of the Space Invaders Button I learned a lot about all those LED Matrix projects on the net. As a roundup I collected a short overview of all the different projects I found.

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SFH 3310 & SFH 5711 Light Sensors

18 May 2009 Sensors
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After I successfully shed some light its time to see some light. For this you normally use photo diodes, photo transistors or photo resistors. But there are two nice little detectors which I came across, special enough to post them here:

The Osram SFH 3710 and SFH 5711. Both are photo diodes respectively transistors adapted to [...]

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Low Voltage RGB LED

9 May 2009 Tinkering
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Most of my parts want a 3.3V voltage supply. Most of my projects relay on a single coin cell battery at 3V. But driving an RGB LED from 3V is no fun at all. Lets take for example a nice strong RGB LED like the Osram LRTB G6TG – the green channel runs at 3.2V, [...]

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