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If you’d like to start experimenting in DSP, or just want to build a guitar pedal, here’s the project for you. It’s an audio echo using just a microcontroller from the fruitful workshop of [Vinod]. For his circuit, [Vinod] fed the output of a small electret microphone into a small amplifier, and then into the [...]

Tags:  delay dsp microcontroller vinod electret-microphone guitar-pedal digital-delay microcontrollers  

You can find all kinds of LCD screens in broken electronics. But it’s often a chore to figure out how they are controlled if you don’t have a working device that can be used to sniff the communications protocol. [Justin] grabbed this character LCD screen from an old Brother printer and decided to see if [...]

Tags:  lcd salvaged screen justin communications-protocol lcd-screens character-lcd microcontrollers  

We’re used to [Sprite_TM] rolling out his own hacks hot on the heels of new concepts. Now we’re glad to see that [Jeff Ledger] is doing the same thing here. He was inspired by a Kickstarter project which vows to let you use fruit, clay, and a number of other common (but weird for this [...]

Tags:  sprite bananaphone fruit jeff-ledger hot-on-the-heels hacks microcontrollers  

Here’s two builds that print text to a TV with only two pins: Still Alive with an Arduino After seeing all the builds that play Still Alive, [Bob] decided to take a 1972 amber monitor and recreate the cut scene at the end of Portal. The build uses the TVout library for Arduino. There were a few problems [...]

Tags:  arduino microcontroller pins microcontrollers  

[Sulaiman Habsi] and two classmates put together a Morse Code interpreter as a class project at Sultan Qaboos University. The system listens to a morse code signal using a microphone, then translates that input to text which is displayed on this character LCD. The breadboarded circuit feeds an audio signal from the microphone, through an OpAmp, [...]

Tags:  signal interpreter microphone morse-code sultan-qaboos-university morse-code-signal classmates microcontrollers  

[Shane Burrell] decided to spend some time learning how the keypad on the his Kenwood TM-710A APRS radio mic works. It uses a different technique than you might think. Normally a grid of buttons is scanned as a matrix to detect keypresses, but this hardware actually counts pulses on a serial wire to take each [...]

Tags:  aprs keypad wire shane-burrell aprs-radio radio-mic keypresses microcontrollers  

[Andy Brown] wanted one level converter to rule them all, so he set out to build his own which included plenty of options. The chip at the top and center is a pretty neat little device. It’s an NXP 74ALVC164245DL. In addition to having an incredibly long and seemingly meaningless part number, it contains a pair of [...]

Tags:  level plenty conversion andy-brown level-converter microcontrollers  

The folks over at Gadget Gangster have been working on a music visualization system using a Parallax Propeller. The visualizations are awesome in their early-90s demoscene way, and of course we love anything using the oft under-appreciated Propeller. The project is called Video Beats and it generates music visualizations in the style of a blocky but very [...]

Tags:  propeller music visualization music-visualizations music-visualization visualization-system microcontrollers  

This project from a few years back is an interesting take on a metal detector. Instead of building a detection circuit, [Bruno Gavand] replaced the external clock crystal with an inductor. Here you can see the inductor coil next to the PIC 12F683. You can see two components jumping from one breadboard to the other. [...]

Tags:  clock-crystal external-clock inductor microcontrollers  

[Michael Ossman] wrote in to show off his newest project. He calls it the Firefly cap, which we think is something of a play on words. You can see that it serves as the cap of a Mason jar, but it also uses a supercap instead of a rechargeable battery. Posts about firelfly jars go [...]

Tags:  mason-jar supercap ossman microcontrollers  

If you have an idea for a fairly simple USB device but don’t want to invest in the more expensive microcontrollers, this library will be of interest to you. It’s a software implementation of the low-speed USB protocol for PIC 16F628. You can pick these up for around $2, and it just takes a few [...]

Tags:  pic-16f628 software-implementation speed-usb microcontrollers  

[Ben Peoples] works in theatrical electronics. Sounds like fun, and here’s an example of the kind of stuff he does. We’re not sure what event this installation was used for, but if the elevator ride needed something flashy just think of what the party room must have looked like. These HDTV screens on the ceiling [...]

Tags:  sounds-like-fun elevator hdtv microcontrollers  

[Minifloat] is using his TI Launchpad development board as an In-System Programmer for AVR chips (translated). There are a ton of homebrew AVR programmers out there, and using an Arduino for ISP is quite popular. But recently we searched for a way to use the Launchpad as a programmer and didn’t find one. We’d venture [...]

Tags:  launchpad programmer avr avr-programmers isp-programmer system-programmer microcontrollers  

klBASIC is a BASIC interpreter written in C for AVR microcontrollers. [Karl Lunt] developed the project based on an assembly language BASIC interpreter for 68HC11 chips written by [Gordon Doughman]. The transition from assembly to C bulked up the code, so you’ll need a beefy AVR chip in order to store all of it. The [...]

Tags:  gordon-doughman karl-lunt avr-microcontrollers microcontrollers  

A while back, [DragonMinded] picked up a bunch of old arcade and pinball parts from a guy on Craigslist. These parts sat around for a while until a really neat plasma dot matrix display was found in the corner of a box in his garage. Doing the only reasonable thing, [DragonMinded] figured out how to [...]

Tags:  display matrix plasma dot-matrix-display reverse-engineering pinball microcontrollers  

It seems [Charles Moyes] and [Mengxiang Jiang] won’t suffer from the sore wrists and thumbs from an Atari controller any longer. They built a version of Pong played by concentrating and relaxing while wearing an EEG headset. Right now, there’s only enough hardware for one player; when the player operating the red paddle concentrates the paddle [...]

Tags:  paddle player pong charles-moyes sore-wrists moyes eeg microcontrollers  

[Kyle] and an a few of his classmates are wrapping up a microcontroller interfacing class at Purdue and thought it best to send in the results of their efforts. It’s a version of Super Smash Bros. made by just bitbanging pins on a microcontroller. The hardware for the project is based around a Freescale 9S12c32, an updated [...]

Tags:  microcontroller smash-bros freescale microcontrollers  

[Johan's] been working on a chunk of code for about seven years and he thinks it’s ready to help you with your next project. He calls it D1 (The One) and it lets you receive asynchronous data without the need for a hardware USART. It’s capable of working with signals from an IR or RF [...]

Tags:  asynchronous-data chunk johan microcontrollers  

[Shane] is building a new house and wants some, “subtle home automation” as he calls it. His first project is hooking up a small heater to the Internet, and judging from his demo video everything is going swimmingly. [Shane]‘s project is built around an mbed microcontroller that connects to the Internet via an Ethernet connection. The mbed [...]

Tags:  household-devices home-automation google microcontrollers  

[doragasu]‘s wife is always misplacing her keys. To solve this problem, [doragasu] created a small Bluetooth-enabled key fob that is able to remotely sound an alarm when commanded to by a cell phone. The case and LiPo battery of [doragasu]‘s project comes from a small photo frame key fob. The LCD display and PCB of [...]

Tags:  doragasu bluetooth fob photo-frame lcd-display project-comes-from microcontrollers  

[Sebastian] is learning Morse code and CW radio, and of course he needed a telegraph key. Instead of using the terribly unergonomic paddle style key, he built a capacitive touch iambic key over the course of a few evenings. An iambic key usually has two switches. When one switch is closed, it will transmit a [...]

Tags:  telegraph touch course sebastian morse cw-radio telegraph-key paddle-style microcontrollers  

[Dustin Andrews] built this add-on board which works as a proximity sensor. He wanted a standalone sensor for his Arduino projects which would use a single pin as a trigger. This lets him alert the Arduino when an object approaches the sensor without the need for polling or extra code on the Arduino side of [...]

Tags:  arduino proximity sensor dustin-andrews proximity-sensor microcontrollers  

We’re going to have to take [Mike's] word for it that he built Conway’s Game of Life with high-definition video output. That’s because this screenshot is his only proof and it looks a bit fuzzy to us. But we are interested in the project which used an FPGA to generate a 1080p VGA output of [...]

Tags:  life game conway mike game-of-life vga-output video-output microcontrollers  

Don’t mind me, I’m just listening to some tunes during our poker game. Well, that and getting some electronic coaching about poker odds. This board lets you wiggle your toes to input the upcards, and those in your hand. After each entry the gadget will tell you your odds of winning the hand. Take it [...]

Tags:  board poker hand don poker-odds poker-game gadget microcontrollers  

[Vinod] has done a lot of work with microcontrollers, but this is his first try at displaying graphics using composite video. He had a small PAL television on hand, and an ATmega32 which just needs a stable clock source and a few resistors to get things going. There are a lot of other hacks around [...]

Tags:  lot experimenting bit vinod pal clock-source atmega32 displaying-graphics microcontrollers  

[Quinn Dunki] just reported in on the latest iteration in her computer project which is called Veronica. This time she added RAM to increase the VGA performance of her build. Like just about every other part of the project, [Quinn] knew what she wanted to do, but had to overcome a lot of issues along [...]

Tags:  quinn vram project veronica quinn-dunki boot-logo computer-project microcontrollers  

[Bob Alexander's] most recent project is a hack saw resizable ARM breakout board. He wanted to start using more ARM microcontrollers in his projects and went for a breadboard friendly design. It uses a 40-pin dip package, but if you need the horsepower but not the I/O you can literally cut it down to size. [...]

Tags:  board ARM resizable bob-alexander pin-dip-package microcontrollers microcontrollers  

[Chris] put together a bunch of common components to create this wireless pan and tilt system for a security camera or a robot. The motorized base is simple enough, using two servos to make up a mount for the digital camera. In this case he used a parts package which is designed to mount the servos [...]

Tags:  bunch Wireless camera chris tilt-system wireless-pan servos microcontrollers  

Building a capacitance meter is a great exercise. If you’re feeling quite safe in your digital-circuit-only life, this will push just far enough out of the comfort zone for you to see there’s nothing to fear in adding analog circuits to your designs. Here, [Raj] compares a voltage divider and RC timer to calculate the value of [...]

Tags:  capacitance understanding meter capacitance-meter voltage-divider analog-circuits microcontrollers  

The biggest benefit to using the BeagleBone is it’s 700 MHz ARM processor. If you’re just messing around with basic I/O that power is going unused, but [Nuno Alves] is taking advantage of its power. He built a PDF password cracker based on the $85 development board. We recently saw how easy it is to [...]

Tags:  beaglebone password pdf pdf-password-cracker arm-processor s-700 microcontrollers  

[vinod] wanted to familiarize himself with AVR assembly programming, but wanted to do something a little more ambitious than simply blinking an LED. While the completed build does blink a few LEDs, we love that e decided to implement multitasking on his microcontroller. The program [vinod] came up with uses round robin scheduling to give one of [...]

Tags:  vinod assembly avr assembly-programming multitasking microcontrollers  

[Joby Taffey] just rolled out a serial bootloader for the Chipcon CC1110/CC1111 processors. The project is called CCTL and aims to make prototyping with the Girltech IM-ME a bit less tedious. Up until now firmware for the device had to be pushed in with a GoodFET or TI proprietary programmer which was quite slow. But this [...]

Tags:  serial bootloader chipcon girltech joby microcontrollers  

[Radu Motisan] wrote in to share a cool project he has been working on lately, a pulsed microspot welder/cutter. The device is capable of spot welding thin metals such as foils and battery tabs by sending a pair of high current pulses between the two electrodes whenever [Radu] presses the trigger button. The cutting portion [...]

Tags:  welder radu cutter thin-metals current-pulses capacitive-discharge microcontrollers  

Here is [Voelker] showing off his FPGA-based camera hardware. He picked up an ov7670 camera on eBay for about $10 and set to work pulling pixels and processing the images. He’s now able to grab thirty frames per second and push them to his own Java display application. He’s using the Papilio board and if you [...]

Tags:  fpga camera module camera-hardware camera-module ebay microcontrollers  

Armed with four wingtip-mounted Sienar Fleet Systems L-s9.3 laser cannons and a SFS P-s5.6 twin ion engine, the TIE Interceptor has become the scourge of the Rebel fleet, nearly capable of out-running and out-maneuvering the beloved A-wings of Nomad Squadron. Because of [Matt]‘s tireless work, we can now visualize TIE Interceptors on approach with our targeting computers [...]

Tags:  fleet tie oscilloscope d-graphics matt tie-interceptor laser-cannons fleet-systems microcontrollers  

[Vinod Stanur] just finished another hobby project by building a WAV audio player using a microcontroller. He had started development a while back using a PIC microcontroller. But the chip he was using didn’t have enough SRAM to allocate as a playback buffer. When he got his hands on an ATmega32 his mind turned back [...]

Tags:  pic-microcontroller atmega32 hobby-project microcontrollers  

While his wife was out-of-town [James] jumped at the opportunity to do some snooping around with her Chevy Tahoe’s parking assist sensors. We can understand how pulling parts out of someone’s car would make them none too happy. But we find it hilarious that it’s a leased company car he’s tinkering around with. But we’re [...]

Tags:  wife parking car james chevy-tahoe company-car sensors microcontrollers  

[Kayvon] thought that the TV-B-Gone was a fun little device and wanted to build one, but he didn’t have an AVR programmer handy. Rather than picking up some AVR kit and simply building a replica, he decided to give his PIC skills a workout and build a Microchip derivative of his own. The PIC-based TV-B-Gone [...]

Tags:  avr pic tv-b-gone avr-kit avr-programmer microchip microcontrollers  

[Cesar] recently got a PSP display up and running with his FPGA development board. That’s a nice project, but what we really like is that he set aside a lot of time to show how it’s done every step of the way. This isn’t just a tutorial on that particular screen, but an overview of [...]

Tags:  lcd fpga game cesar fpga-development-board lcd-control nice-project microcontrollers  

Here’s a bulky tutorial that will round-out your understanding of ZigBee wireless communications (translated). The protocol is great for hobby electronics projects because it uses low-power short range wireless devices to build a mesh network. The guide covers both hardware and software, but also takes the time to explain what that hardware is doing in the [...]

Tags:  zigbee tutorial Hardware zigbee-wireless hobby-electronics electronics-projects microcontrollers  

Find you’re running out of memory and paying for more expensive chips just to plug this feature gap? Many of the upper offering of chips have the option of adding SRAM thanks to an on-chip hardware feature, but if you don’t have that this 512k SRAM add-on board can be used with any chip that [...]

Tags:  board feature sram chip-hardware hardware-feature prototyping microcontrollers  

[Raphael Abrams] does a lot of freelance work, but he has trouble accurately keeping track of the hours he has put in for his clients. After trying various applications and methods of logging his time, he finally decided to build a device that worked just the way he liked. He calls his device the “Freelance [...]

Tags:  freelance device time raphael-abrams puncher raphael microcontrollers  

This gnarly beast has near-magical qualities. [Sprite_TM] patched it together as a dongle which attaches to a JTAG header (we’re fairly certain this is not a standard footprint for that interface though). He uses it to push code to an FPGA after that device boots. Why? Well, there’s several reason, but the most generic answer [...]

Tags:  code dongle jtag generic-answer magical-qualities microcontrollers  

[Boris Landoni] put together a guide to using an inexpensive 3-axis accelerometer with Arduino. The chip that he chose for the exercise is an MMA7455L made by Freescale. It’s got a lot of nice features packed into it, using hardware to do some of the things you’d need software for with other chips like reporting [...]

Tags:  accelerometer catch arduino boris-landoni cheap-accelerometer axis-accelerometer microcontrollers  

The V-USB library is a pretty handy piece of code that lets you add USB connectivity to ATtiny microcontrollers (it was previously named tinyUSB). But if you’ve ever looked into adding the library to your own projects you may have been stymied by the complexity of the code. There are many examples, but there’s a lack of [...]

Tags:  library usb v-usb usb-firmware usb-library handy-piece microcontrollers  

[Quinn Dunki] got some free stuff from Element14 to evaluate, including this Mircrochip WiFi module. It’s been used as the centerpiece of an Arduino shield in the past, and she grabbed a copy of that library to see if it would play nicely with an ATtiny chip. What follows is a struggle to de-Arduino the [...]

Tags:  arduino attiny wifi quinn-dunki microcontrollers centerpiece microcontrollers  

[William] developed this temperature candle as a tool to help keep babies safe as they sleep. It seems that ambient temperature has an effect on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). This device is meant to alert you when room temperature is outside of the recommended envelope. The board hosts an eight-pin PIC microcontroller (12F683P), a [...]

Tags:  infant-death-syndrome pic-microcontroller sudden-infant-death-syndrome microcontrollers  

This fractal viewer is a great way to get your feet wet with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. The project will give you some experience working with video output, user input, and a whole bunch of math and memory management. [Hamster] built it using the Papilio Plus board which hosts a Spartan 6 FPGA. This continues his [...]

Tags:  csi viewer fractal field-programmable-gate-arrays papilio memory-management microcontrollers  

If you’ve ever wanted to program a microcontroller “in the cloud,” you might want to head over to Inventor Town, an online IDE that allows you to write and compile firmware for the MSP430 series of microcontrollers. After logging in with your Google account, you’re presented with a ‘My Projects’ page. From there, you can [...]

Tags:  internet program microcontroller microcontrollers google Software development  

Let’s get this straight, [Alex] is going to show us how to make controllers like this one? Where do we sign up? Even without seeing it in action we want one, but the urge to build is even greater after he shows it off (check the clip after the break). He’s a design student who [...]

Tags:  wait sign modular alex s-a-design urge microcontrollers  

Check out this 6-pin MSP430 microcontroller. What’s that you say? TI doesn’t make a 6-pin MSP430? True, Texas Instruments doesn’t make one, so [Greg] grabbed his Demel and a cutoff wheel, and chopped up a larger uC to arrive at this package. It may sound a bit crazy at first, but when you think about [...]

Tags:  msp microcontroller doesn greg cutoff-wheel true-texas demel microcontrollers  

[Sprite_TM] was tapped to build a rather large quiz buzzer system. Judging from his past work we’re not surprised that he seemed to have no trouble fulfilling the request. As the system is not likely to be used again (or rarely if it is) he found a way to finish the project that was both [...]

Tags:  sprite quiz system quiz-buzzer buzzer-system microcontrollers  

We’re really not supposed to start a feature like this; but this hack is awesome. It’s a game of Snake implemented by an FPGA dev board. It uses a 16×16 LED matrix as the display and an SNES controller for input. So far it sounds like a very normal version of the game. But as [...]

Tags:  fpga game snake snake-game vhdl hack microcontrollers  

[M. Eric Carr] built this a long time ago as his Senior Project for EET480. It’s an electronic version of the ball-in-maze game. We’ve embedded this video after the break for your convenience. The game has just one input; an accelerometer. If you’re having trouble visualizing the game, it works the same as this Android-based [...]

Tags:  ball-in-maze creativity game m.-eric-carr maze-game eric-carr bit-sound microcontrollers  

There are many microcontrollers available to make robots with, but few that are built with the exact features that you would need to construct one. Meet the [EMGRobotics  MSP430G2553] robot controller board. At $15 without the CPU or $17 with a [MSP430G2553] already plugged into the socket, this control board may make some Arduino enthusiasts [...]

Tags:  board emgrobotics robot robot-controller robot-control exact-features microcontrollers  

[Vinod Stanur] is working with a mouse input and a microcontroller driven LED matrix. The mouse cursor is tracked inside of a window by Python and the resulting coordinates on the LED grid are illuminated. He calls it an LED matrix “Paint Toy” because one of the features he’s included lets the user create pixel [...]

Tags:  led matrix mouse vinod-stanur mouse-cursor mouse-input mouse-movements microcontrollers  

Behold this ATtiny85 based EEPROM programmer. It seems like a roundabout way of doing things, but [Quinn Dunki] wanted to build to her specifications using tools she had on hand. What she came up with is an ATtinyISP USB programmer, pushing data to an ATtiny85, which then programs an EEPROM chip with said data. The [...]

Tags:  programmer eeprom attiny quinn-dunki eeprom-programmer roundabout-way microcontrollers  

[Andy Brown] has been working on a series of tutorials revolving around the STM32 processor family. He’s using the STM32plus development board, with an STM32F1 ARM Cortex M3 processor to drive a couple of different full color graphic LCD screens. His latest installment shows how to read from the touch screen included with both displays. [...]

Tags:  stm touch screen andy-brown lcd-screens processor-family microcontrollers  

[Eric Gregori] recently spent some time messing around with a Hexbug Spider, and wrote in to share some modifications he made to the toy. In its unaltered form the robot can be controlled remotely, and while it’s fun to play with, the excitement is short lived. Using a TI MSP430 along with a small motor [...]

Tags:  ti-msp430 gregori excitement microcontrollers  

We love the extra touches that [Andrianakis Haris] added to his two-zone electronic thermometer. It includes features that you just wouldn’t find on a mass-market commercial product because of issues like added cost. For example, you can see that the PCB juts up above the LCD display, allowing the module to be mounted on a [...]

Tags:  andrianakis over-engineering thermometer electronic-thermometer haris lcd-display microcontrollers  

[Fezoj] likes to play around with microcontrollers and decided that he wanted to try a Bus Pirate as a new tool in his adventures. Since it’s open hardware he had his own board made and populated it himself. The trouble is, he works only with AVR chips and doesn’t have a PIC programmer. No problem, [...]

Tags:  program pic atmega pic-programmer atmega8 open-hardware microcontrollers  

[Scot Kornak] got his hands on the new STM32 Discovery Board. He got his as a free giveaway, but at only $18 he probably would have picked one up anyway. His one complaint about the device is that he dual pin-headers which break out the ARM processor’s pins are not the most convenient for hooking [...]

Tags:  ARM board breakout scot scot-kornak pin-headers arm-processor free-giveaway microcontrollers  

Prolific Hack a Day author [Mike S] has been playing in his lab again and he’s come up with a neat way to talk to microcontrollers with an LCD monitor. The basic idea behind [Mike]‘s work isn’t much different from the weird and/or cool Timex Datalink watch from the 1990s. Despite the fancy dev board, the [...]

Tags:  microcontroller monitor comm mike dev-board timex microcontrollers  

[Achu Wilson] was watching TV when he saw an ad for Volkswagen’s latest Passat, which happens to come equipped with a park assist mode. This essentially allows the car to park itself with little to no user interaction. While these systems come as a pricey add-on option, he figured he could build something similar in [...]

Tags:  self build car wilson achu watching-tv passat microcontrollers  

Stepper motors are pretty easy to control with a microcontroller. But if you’re looking to run then at a high number of revolutions per second things get tricky pretty quickly. [Uwe's] been learning about and building stepper drivers for years, and recently he decided to build a high-performance driver based on a MicroChip reference design. [...]

Tags:  speed microcontroller stepper uwe performance-driver reference-design microcontrollers  

The beta version of Pyxis 3 is now available. Skewworks continues to develop the ARM operating system, and with the transition to version 3 they’ve given it a new name: Gadgetos. One big difference from Pyxis 2 is that the new kernal is closed source. But they’ve taken steps to ensure that the OS is [...]

Tags:  pyxis beta gadgetos kernal beta-version operating-system microcontrollers  

[Phil] uses both his computer’s speakers and a set of headphones while working at his desk, but he was growing tired of constantly having to remove the headset from his sound card in order to insert the speaker plug. He’s been meaning to rig something up to make it easier to switch outputs, but never [...]

Tags:  plug switcher tiny phil audio-switcher sound-card headphones microcontrollers  

The echo box performs exactly as its name implies. If you tap out a rhythm on the lid, it will tap the same thing back to you. Except it isn’t tapping to make the sound, but vibrating. The concept is similar to the Knock Block. In that hack, a piezo element detected a rapping on [...]

Tags:  box name sound echo piezo-element echo-box rhythm microcontrollers  

Reading from a large number of inputs, like this piano keyboard, can be tedious. Even when multiplexing there’s a lot to keep track of. But if you choose the right microcontroller, you may have hardware assistance. Here’s an ATmega640 is using it’s external memory interface to read the key matrix. You may remember the Open [...]

Tags:  matrix memory interface external-memory-interface input-matrix hardware-assistance microcontrollers  

[Hamster] wanted to take a look at division operations when the chip you’re using doesn’t have a divide instruction. He makes the point that the divide instruction takes a lot of space on the die, and that’s why it’s sometimes excluded from a chip’s instruction set. For instance, he tells us the ARM processor used [...]

Tags:  processor instruction division hardware-division arm-processor division-operations microcontrollers  

[Nicholas] wanted to add some flair to his RC car. In addition to the headlights that you see above, there’s brake lights, and a horn that plays “Dixie” like the General Lee in the Dukes of Hazard. All of this is triggered by the wireless controller, but he figured out a way to monitor the [...]

Tags:  radio sound flair nicholas general-lee dixie radio-controlled-vehicles s-brake dukes-of-hazard microcontrollers  

We find it interesting that PIC and AVR programming is very common in hobby electronics but ARM doesn’t have nearly the same foothold. This is partly because there’s a knowledge barrier involved with making the transition (the other part is probably the lack of DIP packaged chips). But if you’ve worked with 8-bit microcontrollers you [...]

Tags:  primer ARM Programming hobby-electronics usart foothold microcontrollers  

[Arshad Pathan] let us know about his latest project, a modular code lock that can be adapted to many different situations. The user interface is made up of a character LCD screen and a 3×4 keypad. For this example [Arshad] is using a stepper motor as the locking mechanism. When the board is first powered [...]

Tags:  arshad lock full featured-security character-lcd stepper-motor microcontrollers  

Here’s an interesting article about reading data from shift registers using less than three pins. 74HC165 shift registers are a popular choice for adding inputs to a microcontroller. They have a parallel input register which can be read using the latch, then shifted into a microcontroller via the data and clock pins. For those counting, [...]

Tags:  shift pin microcontroller clock-pins shift-registers parallel-input microcontrollers  

So you’re getting better at programming microcontrollers and now you want to do several things at once? You know better than that, microcontrollers are only capable of processing one thing at a time. But if you’re clever with your coding you can achieve something that behaves as if several things are going on at once. [...]

Tags:  microcontroller bit field programming-microcontrollers field-structures c-bit microcontrollers  

[Andrew] is trying to buckle down and hammer out his PhD project but was surprised by the sorry state of the configuration options for his FPGA/ARM dev board. Using JTAG was painfully slow, so he studied the datasheet to see if there was another way. It turns out the Xilinx FPGA he’s using does have [...]

Tags:  fpga serial config andrew xilinx-fpga phd-project sorry-state microcontrollers  

If you want people to really be impressed by your projects it’s often better not to have a fully finished look. In this case, we think hooking the stripboard version of FIGnition up to your TV will raise a lot more eyebrows than the PCB version will. [Julian] put together a guide to building the computer on [...]

Tags:  version fignition stripboard julian flint pcb-version simple-computer eyebrows microcontrollers  

So we saw this tip come in and thought–oh, another POV device. We watched the video (embedded after the break), took a sip of coffee, then almost sprayed the beverage all over the computer when we realized that this uses a diy sensor to synchronize the POV image. [Ch00f] came up with the idea for [...]

Tags:  accelerometer image diy pov bauble sip microcontrollers  

You might already have the hardware on hand to easily interface I2C and SPI devices with Python scripts on your computer. The board seen above is an FT-2232 breakout board. These chips are often used to facilitate JTAG programming via USB, but they have other features that might be useful to you as well. The [...]

Tags:  board python spi python-scripts bridges chips microcontrollers  

Looks like the Lightweight USB Framework for AVRs (LUFA) has just been ported for ARM microcontrollers. NXP recently released a package for their LPC Cortex M3 family of ARM controllers. You won’t find a reference to LUFA on their nxpUSBlib description page (which we think is kind of sad), but if you grab a copy [...]

Tags:  ARM usb lufa arm-processors microcontrollers cortex microcontrollers  

[Quinn Dunki] is looking to augment the tools she has available at her electronics bench and built the HEX Out as a mock-logic sniffer. The device reads 8 or 16-bit inputs, showing the current state of those connections on a 7-segment display. This requires that you’re comfortable reading Hex codes, but if you’re not it’s [...]

Tags:  quinn hex bus quinn-dunki hex-codes data-bus microcontrollers  

[Blaise Jarrett] has been grinding away to get the WebSocket protocol to play nicely with PIC microcontrollers. Here he’s using the PIC 18F4620 along with a Roving Networks RN-XV WiFi module to get the device on the network. He had started with a smaller processor but ran into some RAM restrictions so keep that in [...]

Tags:  websocket pic protocol blaise-jarrett pic-microcontrollers roving-networks blaise microcontrollers  

We’ve all seen them – those fireplace DVDs that seem to pop up on grocery store endcaps and get traded in white elephant gift exchanges. If you don’t happen to have a fireplace in your home they might make a reasonable solution, but [Nick] from the Gadget Gangster thought it would be far better if [...]

Tags:  white-elephant-gift winter-evenings gift-exchanges microcontrollers  

[Will] wrote in to share a useful add-on he designed for the ChipKIT UNO 32, a 12-port temperature sensor board. Constructed for one of his customers, the shield accepts any 2-wire 10k thermistor sensors, outputting the readings to a small LCD screen. The screen is supported by some code put together by his associate [crenn], [...]

Tags:  temperature shield chipkit thermistor-sensors sensor-board temperature-sensor microcontrollers  

Small and more powerful… what more can you want? This is the newest BeagleBoard offering, called the BeagleBone. It’s packed with some pretty intriguing features, but let’s take a tour of the hardware first. Like its predecessors, the BeagleBone sports an ARM processor. This time around it’s a TI AM3358 ARM Cortex-A8. It will ship with [...]

Tags:  beaglebone friend ARM intriguing-features beagleboard arm-processor microcontrollers  

The advent of integrated USB peripherals in microprocessors (PIC, AVR, etc.) has certainly taken a lot of the work out of developing USB devices, not to mention reducing the silicon parts in these designs. But do you know what you’re doing when it comes to controlling them with user-friendly applications? [Simon Inns] is lending a [...]

Tags:  usb advent pc-side simon-inns usb-peripherals usb-devices microprocessors microcontrollers  

[Chris] just posted his latest tutorial which shows you how to read position data from a resistive touchscreen. These devices are fairly simple, and since they’re used in a lot of consumer electronics you can pick one up for a few bucks. This looks like it is overstock for an old Palm device. The interface [...]

Tags:  tutorial reading position chris resistive-touchscreens resistive-touchscreen palm-device microcontrollers  

If you have ever traveled around Europe, you are likely familiar with parking discs. Required in many countries that would rather not deal with parking meters, these devices are placed in the front of a car’s window, and indicate when the vehicle was parked. When parking enforcement officers come through the area, it makes quick [...]

Tags:  disc hacked parking parking-enforcement-officers parking-meters europe microcontrollers  

[Bertho] really enjoyed pawing through the pile of projects submitted to the 7400 logic contest. But one thing kept hitting him with the vast majority of the entries: decoupling capacitors were missing from the circuits. If you’ve worked with microcontrollers or digital logic chips you probably know that you’re supposed to add a small capacitor [...]

Tags:  logic pile bertho decoupling-capacitors logic-chips digital-logic microcontrollers  

This project shows you one possible way to use HTML5 to fully integrate sensor data from a microcontroller into our technological lives. Now, when we saw this tip come through our inbox we thought it would be an interesting example to learn from but we weren’t ready for how truly cool the setup is. Take [...]

Tags:  html wicked sensor sensor-data microcontroller inbox microcontrollers  

[Arko] was compelled to purchase an iclicker to use in some of his college courses. It’s similar in size to a television remote control except it only has six buttons and it communicates via radio frequency instead of infrared light. The idea is that classrooms have a base station that the instructor uses, and he [...]

Tags:  iclicker Hardware snooping television-remote-control arko infrared-light microcontrollers  

[Joel] dug up this hack that he pulled off over ten years ago. It’s inspired by the Nintendo PowerGlove, and uses flex sensors to react to movements of your fingers. The interesting thing is, he built these optical flex sensors himself. He likes to say that this is a ghetto fiber-optic setup. The inlaid diagram [...]

Tags:  powerglove nintendo building joel flex-sensors ghetto microcontrollers  

[Marcus Gritsch] wanted to do his retro gaming using retro hardware… or at least using some retro hardware. Although he was playing his Commodore 64 games in an emulator, he figured that using an original controller would boost the nostalgia quite a bit. This is a vintage Competition Pro joystick that has buttons and a [...]

Tags:  retro Hardware joystick marcus-gritsch commodore-64-games vintage-competition competition-pro-joystick microcontrollers  

[Rajendra] found an easy way to make a USB temperature logger. He already had a USB to UART adapter that takes care of the heavy lifting. On one end it’s got the USB plug, on the other a set of pins provide a ground connection, 3.3V and 5V feed, as well as RX/TX lines. To [...]

Tags:  temperature logger usb temperature-logger usb-plug heavy-lifting microcontrollers  

[Larsim] worked out the timing necessary to read button and joystick data from an N64 controller using an ATtiny85 microcontroller. The project was spawned when he found this pair of controllers in the dumpster. We often intercept great stuff bound for the landfill, especially on Hippie Christmas when all the student switch apartments at the [...]

Tags:  controller attiny input n64-controller dumpster great-stuff microcontrollers  

If you’re gaming on the road, or just don’t have a die with the right number of sides on hand, an electronic polyhedral die will be quite handy. [Marcus] built this using a printed circuit board of his own design, and we think an electronically simple project like this is a great way to get [...]

Tags:  die gaming electronic marcus printed-circuit-board electronic-die polyhedral microcontrollers  

Ultrasonic rangfinders are a cheap and easy way to gather obstacle avoidance data. When added to a servo motor they form something of a scanning radar for near-proximity objects. In this implementation, [Rui Cabral] is driving the servo, and collecting data from the sensor using a PIC 18F4520. The servo rotates 180 degreees, taking sensor [...]

Tags:  radar servo ultrasonic ultrasonic-rangefinder obstacle-avoidance servo-motor microcontrollers  

Tinywrench is [Tanjent's] take on a motor controller board. It aims to replicate all of the functions that a standalone motor controller chip offers at as low a cost as possible. Early results are in. It works, and as seen can be assembled for about $8. The top of the device offers a terminal block [...]

Tags:  controller tinywrench motor motor-controller-board controller-chip terminal-block microcontrollers  

[Fernando] sent in a tangential project update that uses an ATtiny45 to play Pong on his television. Last time we looked in on his work he had just finished getting the eight-pin chip to display a big number on the TV via the VGA port. This expands on the idea while he continues to wait [...]

Tags:  pin-chip vga-port pong microcontrollers  

[Jamie] built his own USB connected arcade controller. We’ve been seeing a lot of these lately, and they usually involve soldering buttons to a keyboard PCB. But [Jamie] decided to go a different route and use his own microcontroller. This method always gets a bit hairy when it comes to deciding how to connect it [...]

Tags:  arcade controller usb jamie arcade-controller microcontroller pcb microcontrollers  

A few months back, [Phil] was looking to get into PIC development, but he couldn’t seem to find a simple development board for the PIC16F883 microcontroller he wanted to use. Since no retail offering had exactly what he was looking for, he decided to put together a dev board of his own. He spent a [...]

Tags:  pic-development dev-board diy microcontrollers  

This game storage box will also keep score for you. [Marcus] built it for playing the card game Munkin, but some clever programming could adapt it for most needs. The hardware is built around an ATtiny2313 to do the thinking, and a MAX7219 to drive the 7-segment displays. Each player has their own two-digit score [...]

Tags:  storage game box marcus max7219 clever-programming storage-box microcontrollers  

[Quinn] over at Blondihacks has been working with AVR microcontrollers a lot recently, and wanted a quick way to program the ATtiny13a (her current AVR of choice) while the chip is still seated in a breadboard. To speed up code revision and testing, she built a small programming header that she calls the Bread Head. [...]

Tags:  head avr bread bread-head avr-microcontrollers code-revision microcontrollers  

For less than $100 you can buy a little tracking module that will upload your location to a satellite. But you’ll only get latitude and longitude information. [Natrium42] spent some time reverse engineering the hardware, and the communications protocol, to allow custom data to be transferred using a SPOT module. The flat fee for the [...]

Tags:  spot information satellite latitude-and-longitude communications-protocol satellite-tracker microcontrollers  

Here’s an open source RFID cloner design that is about the same size as a standard RFID key card. It doesn’t need a battery to capture key codes, just the magnetic field generated by an RFID reader. You can see the functionality demonstrated in the video after the break. By holding the bottom button as [...]

Tags:  passive tag rfid bottom-button rfid-reader rfid-tag microcontrollers  

UPDATE: As several readers have already noted, these things sold out very quickly – in less than 15 minutes!  Big thanks to Basic Micro! If you have been considering the purchase of a Basic ATOM Nano product, but you weren’t quite ready to lay down the cash for a dev board and Nano microcontroller, boy [...]

Tags:  atom micro basic nano nano-giveaway dev-board 15-minutes microcontrollers  

[Mike] has been filling up a rather intense wiki entry outlining how to run uClinux on a DE0-nano FPGA board. This is an inexpensive dev board that will run you somewhere between $80 and $100. Right off the bat he goes into a hefty list of the reasons that this is a foolish activity. To name [...]

Tags:  fpga board nano mike fpga-board linux-kernel dev-board microcontrollers  

[Mike Shegedin] makes full use of an 8-pin microcontroller with this ATtiny13-based dice project. With a maximum of six I/O pins (that includes using the reset pin as I/O) he needed a couple of tricks in order to drive 14 LEDs and use a momentary push button for user input. We’re certainly familiar with the [...]

Tags:  use hacks attiny mike-shegedin pin-microcontroller reset-pin leds microcontrollers  

[Brad] was asked by his Sister to design a motion-based alarm that would help her catch her son sneaking out of the house at night. Obviously this didn’t need to be a long-term installation so he decided to throw something together that is only active at night and can be battery-powered. What he came up [...]

Tags:  motion night alarm brad microcontrollers  

The team at LeafLabs was looking for something cool to do with their new ARM development board. [AJ] asked if anyone had ever played around with Python, so [Dave] cooked up an implementation of PyMite and put it on a Maple board. While the writeup is only about blinking a LED with a microcontroller, they’re [...]

Tags:  board python microcontroller dave writeup microcontrollers  

An inductor and 8-pin microcontroller are all that make up this barebones RFID tag. You might have done a double-take when first seeing the image above. After all, there’s nothing hooked up to the power and ground pins on the chip. As [Ramero Pareja] explains in his post, the power is actually supplied via the [...]

Tags:  power tag rfid pin-microcontroller ground-pins rfid-tag microcontrollers  

Servo8bit is a library for AVR microcontrollers that allows you to drive servo motors without the need for a 16-bit timer. Obviously, this is quite useful for smaller chips that only have 8-bit timers and it is specifically targeted at the ATtiny45 and ATtiny85 microcontrollers. The library offers 256 steps of resolution, and can drive up to [...]

Tags:  library servo attiny servo-motors microcontrollers hacks microcontrollers  

Okay, you’ve got a six-pin microcontroller with 1k of program memory, 32 bytes of SRAM, and it can’t be programmed using an In-System-Programmer. Do you think you can use it to develop a game? [Wrtlprnft] managed to build a Simon Says game based on the diminutive device that has four buttons and four LEDs. Judging [...]

Tags:  game hacks attiny simon-says pin-microcontroller simon-says-game system-programmer microcontrollers  

[Parker Dillmann] is nearing the end of the prototyping process for his Propeller development board. He wanted a tool that let him work on projects without the need for a bunch of equipment, while still maintaining the ability to extend the hardware when necessary. His last dev board used a large piece of protoboard to host [...]

Tags:  board propeller development parker-dillmann protoboard dev-board microcontrollers  

[TZ] has been using ATtiny microcontrollers to read and pass along data from his Harley Davidson motorcycle. The image you see above is using an ATtiny 4313 to read data from the J1850 bus. The J1850 protocol is an older standard which may not be available in newer vehicles. But if your vehicle has it, [...]

Tags:  motorcycle bus attiny harley-davidson j1850-protocol j1850-bus harley-davidson-motorcycle microcontrollers  

[Alan Parekh] and his daughter [Alexis] just premiered their entry in the Avnet Dog Days of Summer contest. It’s a game called Karate Chop that is basically an electronic Simon Says. The video after the break shows a demonstration of the device. When switched on it’ll play a little tune and start cycling the LEDs [...]

Tags:  daughter karate chop alan-parekh summer simon simon-says karate-chop daughter-alexis summer-contest microcontrollers  

A couple of weeks ago we put up a post titled Addressing Microchip’s open source problem where we talked about some of their shortcomings as far as open source code goes, specifically the TCP/IP stack and the USB stack. The comments were predictably fairly negative. The interesting part here is that Microchip actually listened. If [...]

Tags:  tcp microchip usb open-source-code usb-stack ip-stacks microcontrollers  

[Gadre] built his own ATtiny project without using any batteries. It’s an electronic Dice (or die if you’re being critical) which uses induction to charge a storage capacitor to act as the power source. The voltage generator is made from a tube of Perspex which houses a set of rare-earth magnets. At the enter of [...]

Tags:  gadre hacks attiny rare-earth-magnets storage-capacitor electronic-dice microcontrollers  

Yup. We have all been there. You throw together a really elaborate Arduino project that only really needs a couple pins, far fewer than the Arduino’s native microcontrollers have to offer. Well fear not, [Thatcher] has solved just this problem by adding some ATTtiny cores to the Arduino IDE. His blog details the process from [...]

Tags:  arduino project attiny thatcher microcontrollers cores hacks  

[Clifford Wolf] wrote in to let us know about a project he recently completed called EmbedVM. It’s a virtual machine for AVR microcontrollers. The package has a relatively small overhead, taking up about 3kB of program memory. The VM can execute 74,000 instructions per second, and runs asynchronously from the microcontroller. As [Clifford] demonstrates in [...]

Tags:  avr machine virtual clifford clifford-wolf avr-microcontrollers program-memory microcontrollers  

[Fernando] is working on creating a game at home, with live scoring displayed on a large LCD TV. He’s keeping mum as to what the game entails, but he was more than happy to spill the details on how he planned to use the television as a wireless scoreboard. The writeup is the first part [...]

Tags:  video game vga fernando video-output writeup lcd-tv microcontrollers  

[Youchun Zhang] and [Annie (Wei) Dai] found a way to differentiate vowel sounds using an ATmega644 as their final project for a microcontroller design class. Voice recognition is not out of the ordinary, but most of the time it uses a computer, smart phone, or specially designed hardware. This implementation uses an ATmega644, a microphone [...]

Tags:  vowel recognition atmega dai annie vowel-recognition vowel-sounds microcontroller-design microcontrollers  

If you’ve got an ARM development board gathering dust in the corner of your shop, perhaps you could repurpose it as an oscilloscope. [Arend-Paul Spijkerman] was able to use an mbed and LPCXpresso as the hardware end of an oscilloscope. He didn’t use a standalone screen as a display, instead opting to push the scope [...]

Tags:  ARM oscilloscope development paul-spijkerman gathering-dust oscilloscopes microcontrollers  

We’ve got to admit, we’re pretty much cheapskates when it comes to buying electronic bits online. Whether its microcontrollers or PCBs, we hate to part with money. So, we were pretty excited to hear that Texas Instruments is dishing out deals two weeks at a time to hackers, makers, and the like. Several of you [...]

Tags:  penny web site penny-pincher cheapskates microcontrollers news  

[Rajendra Bhatt] wrote in to share the latest in a series of PIC tutorials, which covers the microcontroller’s Sleep mode – a very useful tool for limiting current consumption in battery-powered applications. He discusses how to put the PIC in sleep mode, as well as some common mistakes to watch out for, such as accidentally [...]

Tags:  mode pic stretch pic-tutorials sleep-mode very-useful-tool microcontrollers  

[Victor's] girlfriend works at a museum and enlisted his expertise in designing an interactive detective game for kids visiting the museum. The vision was for the kids to discover phone numbers that they could call for clues. Originally he planned to display the clues on a character LCD, but obviously it’s much neater to hear [...]

Tags:  museum wonder sister victor detective-game game-for-kids interactive-museum microcontrollers  

Microsoft has thrown its hat into the open source hardware hobby market. Their offering is called the Gadgeteer. We’d love to tell you all about it, but the big M didn’t make it very easy to find out about the device and it’s addons. When we set out to find what processor is running on [...]

Tags:  microsoft arduino attempt open-source-hardware hobby-market gadgeteer microcontrollers  

If you are in the market for a PIC microcontroller programmer, you may want to consider a model with an In-Circuit Debugger (ICD). [Rajendra] put together a great tutorial on using an ICD when debugging PIC firmware, which makes a pretty convincing argument for owning one. In his tutorial, he happens to be using a [...]

Tags:  tutorial icd pic pic-microcontroller-programmer pic-firmware circuit-debugger microcontrollers  

Here’s a new option for building your own AVR programmer. It’s called the MkII Slim and the diminutive size makes it live up to its name. The design is rather spartan, using just three chips; a voltage regulator, a MAX3002 level converter, and an Atmel AT90USB162 as the main microcontroller. This chip has a built-in [...]

Tags:  programmer mkii avr level-converter diminutive-size voltage-regulator microcontrollers  

[Chris] has recently become a self-declared Reddit addict and wanted to build something that would streamline the process of voting on posts. Inspired by the Awesome Button hack featured on Make a little while back, he thought that a physical upvote/downvote button would be the ideal peripheral for all of his Reddit needs. He was [...]

Tags:  upvote button reddit chris addict hack microcontrollers  

[Scott] was driving in the pouring rain behind a car with its blinkers on when inspiration struck. He had previously created a simple communications system using his sound card that allowed him to send data to a microcontroller from his PC, but he thought that doing the same thing with light would be an interesting [...]

Tags:  simple-communications pouring-rain blinkers microcontrollers  

[Scott] found the iCufflinks from Adafruit Industries pretty interesting, but he thought that the stated run time of 24 hours was a bit short. He figured he could improve the product’s power consumption at least a little bit, to improve the overall battery life. From their schematics, he placed an order for parts and built [...]

Tags:  study power bit scott power-consumption schematics battery-life microcontrollers  

Interrupts are the name of the game for more functional microcontroller firmware. [Rajendra] just posted a tutorial covering all of the interrupt types for the PIC 16F688 microcontroller. He gives an overview of all of the major points: what an interrupt is, what causes interrupts, how to read the datasheet (often overlooked) to set up [...]

Tags:  pic microcontroller understanding pic-microcontrollers name-of-the-game rajendra microcontrollers  

A few years back Atmel announced a new line of chips, the XMega series. We see the name bouncing around here and there, but when [Michael Kleinigger] mentioned that he’s seen very few project using these chips we realized that not only is he right, but we know next to nothing about them. Just give his [...]

Tags:  xmega line atmel michael-kleinigger chips microcontrollers  

If you’ve ever wondered about the use of or theory behind or the use of accelerometers, this tutorial by Love Electronics is a very good resource. In this article, Love takes one through how to hook up an ADXL345 accelerometer and use it with a Netduino processor. Before the subject of hooking everything up is [...]

Tags:  love accelerometers use accelerometer microcontrollers  

Pulse Width Modulation is definitely the preferred method of dimming an LED with a microcontroller, but we were interested in hearing about a different method called Binary Code Modulation. BCM does the same thing as PWM, it turns the LED on and off very rapidly so that your eye cannot detect a flicker. The brightness [...]

Tags:  led modulation binary pulse-width-modulation pwm microcontroller microcontrollers  

[ Jack Gassett] is working on an FPGA shield for the Arduino. At first the idea of this expansion board seemed a little silly. But [Jack] mentions that the FPGA board can be quite useful for adding higher-order electronic complexity like HDMI capabilities to an Arduino. We’re not totally sold on the idea, but he’s not [...]

Tags:  fpga shield arduino jack-gassett jack fpga-board complexity capabilities microcontrollers  

On many new cars, automatic wiper speed control can be had as an upgrade, though most cars do not offer front-end collision prevention at all. [Rishi Hora] and [Diwakar Labh], students at the Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology in New Delhi, developed their own version of these features, (PDF warning, skip to page 20) which [...]

Tags:  wiper speed control new-delhi guru-tegh-bahadur collision-prevention collision-avoidance microcontrollers  

The usual way send data from a microcontroller is either over RS-232 with MAX232 serial ICs, crystals, and a relatively ancient computer, or by bit-banging the USB protocol and worrying about driver issues. Not content with these solutions, [Scott] came up with sound card μC/PC communication that doesn’t require any extra components. [Scott] bought a [...]

Tags:  card communication microcontroller scott usb-protocol pc-communication ancient-computer microcontrollers  

Did you know that most AVR chips have a type of hardware exclusive OR (XOR) option when it comes to the logic levels of the output pins? If you look in the datasheet (the image above is a screenshot from an ATtiny13 datasheet) you’ll find a section on Toggling the Pin. It turns out that [...]

Tags:  output Hardware xor output-pins logic-levels microcontrollers  

[Arthur Benemann] started a little project for his electrical engineering program, and suffered the worst case of feature creep we’ve ever seen. He just posted an instructable of his picChess project that is able to play chess on a VGA monitor with a keyboard, with sound, a clock, temperature sensor. Apparently, [Arthur] was bored one [...]

Tags:  chess microcontroller project arthur-benemann arthur instructable playing-chess vga-monitor microcontrollers  

The team over at Archonix frequently challenge themselves to create a full working project in under 20 minutes. [Andrew Armstrong] put together a blog post detailing their most recent “Quickproject” – a simple Twitter notifier built using their Boobie Board. They started by putting together a small notifier breakout module that could later be attached [...]

Tags:  boobie board notifier andrew-armstrong twitter microcontrollers  

[Sergio Campamá] wrote in to tell us he’s assembled a guide for compiling the latest release of MSPGCC. This is a cross-compiling tool chain for the popular MSP430 line of microncontrollers. We used a version available from the Ubuntu repositories when developing with the TI Launchpad and the eZ430-F2013. Installing from repositories is easy, but [...]

Tags:  toolchain mspgcc guide sergio-campam ubuntu-repositories tool-chain microcontrollers  

[Owen] just finished putting together a portable helicopter game. It’s pretty impressive, especially since he used an ATtiny13 microcontroller. That chip uses an 8-pin dip package, offering only five I/O pins (six if you use the reset pin) and 1k of programming space. The game runs on a small cellphone-type LCD screen. The helicopter remains [...]

Tags:  game attiny helicopter owen pin-dip-package helicopter-game programming-space microcontrollers  

Those following the ProtoStack tutorials will be happy to hear that there is a new installment which explains Pulse Width Modulation. If you’ve never heard of PWM before, it’s a method of generating a signal that is logic 1 for a portion of the time and logic 0 for the remainder of the time. It [...]

Tags:  width pulse modulation pulse-width-modulation pwm remainder microcontrollers  

[manuka], aka [Stan Swan] is a teacher in New Zealand who enjoys enlightening his students on the wonders of electrical circuits. He primarily uses “snap connector” circuit kits, sold under the BrainBox name in NZ, for his interactive labs as they can be easily manipulated by pupils of all ages. While the kits are great, [...]

Tags:  enhancing manuka circuit stan-swan new-zealand electrical-circuits interactive-labs microcontrollers  

Hackaday reader [Louis] wrote in to call our attention to a neat project over at Kickstarter that he thought would interest his fellow readers. The AlienCortex AV is a pre-built FPGA board from [Bryan Pape] with gobs of ports and a ton of potential. At the heart of the board is an Xilinx PQ208 Spartan [...]

Tags:  fpga-board neat-project kickstarter microcontrollers  

Here’s a photo of the circuit board for the Maximite, a BASIC interpreter that [Geoff] built. The design idea was sparked when he was exploring the possibilities of the PIC32 family of chips. [Geoff] wanted to write about the hardware for a magazine article but needed an actual product to really show it off. The [...]

Tags:  basic build interpreter geoff basic-interpreter design-idea magazine-article microcontrollers  

[Giorgos Lazaridis'] most recent project was to build a capacitive touch pad. Since he’s using a PIC 16F1937 it will be relatively easy. That’s because it has a 16 channel capacitance sensing module built right in. But there are still some design considerations that make the development a bit touching. This isn’t the first time [...]

Tags:  capacitance keypad pic design-considerations touch-pad microcontrollers  

Microcontrollers are digital devices at heart. They can do fancy things like convert analog signals into a digital value but going the other direction is a bit tougher. Pulse-Width Modulation is used to approximate an analog output but what you’re actually doing is turning the operating voltage on and off very quickly to achieve an [...]

Tags:  output beginner analog pulse-width-modulation analog-signals analog-output microcontrollers  

There are times when you don’t need much processing power for your project but you do need a lot of I/O pins. It often doesn’t make economic sense to choose a larger microcontroller just to get extra pins so the answer is to use a port expander chip. [Raendra] posted a guide for using one [...]

Tags:  processing working port port-expanders port-expander economic-sense microcontrollers  

The team at Leaf Labs just released a new library to demonstrate the VGA capabilities of their Maple dev board. Although it’s only a 16 by 18 pixel image, it shows a lot of development over past video implementations on the Maple. The Maple is a great little Ardunio-compatible board with a strangely familiar IDE. [...]

Tags:  board vga maple leaf-labs compatible-board new-library implementations microcontrollers  

[Craig] sent in a link to this project which manages to implement color tracking on an 8-bit microcontroller at 60 frames per second. That’s some pretty incredible performance, but we’re also not talking about using a hobby-grade microcontroller. The C8051F360 is an ARM microcontroller with 100 MIPS throughput and with a system clock that can [...]

Tags:  color microcontroller bit craig system-clock mips throughput microcontrollers  

A few years ago, [Beth] came up with the idea of using an AVR as an RFID tag. She’s gotten sidetracked with a few other projects in the meantime but her idea has surfaced again, this time as a duct tape RFID tag. The build is just four components: 0.1 µF and 1 nF capacitors, [...]

Tags:  tag avr rfid beth rfid-tag capacitors duct-tape microcontrollers  

For some projects, it’s okay to have a microcontroller twiddling it’s thumbs most of the time. When a project requires the cpu to do just one thing over and over, there’s no loss with inefficient code – it either works or it doesn’t. However, if a project requires a microcontroller to do several things at [...]

Tags:  code microcontroller project inefficient-code efficiency microcontrollers  

It seems like all the cool kids are leaving the 8-bit hobby microcontrollers in the parts bin and playing with more advanced parts like Complex Programmable Logic Devices. [Chris] is no exception to the trend, and set out to generate his own VGA signal using one of the beefy semiconductors. It seems that he’s using [...]

Tags:  cpld vga dabbling chris programmable-logic-devices vga-signals vga-signal microcontrollers  

[Q] is an Electrical Engineer who works in an industrial setting. He frequently uses Programmable Logic Controllers at work but had never built one himself. He decided to undertake the project at home and managed to build a PLC that outputs 120V AC or 12 V DC and has optoisolated inputs. On the circuit board [...]

Tags:  build programmable logic v-dc v-ac programmable-logic-controller programmable-logic-controllers electrical-engineer microcontrollers  

Being a long time prankster, [cyclonite] came up with this pretty clever hack in an old USB flash drive. The drive was removed from its case, and the stock memory and controller was removed. On the back, an attiny 2313 is glued to the pcb, while resistors are swapped to work with the VUSB library. [...]

Tags:  drive prankster usb usb-flash-drive resistors pcb microcontrollers  

[Fede.tft] wrote in to tell us about some work he’s been doing to save battery life for LED dominoes. He originally got the idea after reading this post about the electronic gaming pieces. That project was aimed at the 555 timer contest and therefore, used a 555 timer. [Fede.tft] calculates the battery life for the [...]

Tags:  led battery life gaming-pieces dominoes battery-life microcontrollers  

[Rajendra Bhatt] writes in to let us know about a nice simple IR bounce tachometer. The project uses a startUSB for PIC board and a 16×2 character LCD with a very basic Infrared bounce circuit.  Measuring either a reflective or non reflective spot in the rotating object, in this case a bit of white paper, [...]

Tags:  simple tachometer bounce reflective-spot pic-board character-lcd microcontrollers  

Texas Instruments just released a product they call the Capacitive Touch Boosterpack which is basically a touch-sensitive shield for the Launchpad. The video after the break shows an unboxing and demonstration of the product which TI is launching with a $4.30 limited-time price tag. The red PCB itself has a capacitive touch button in the [...]

Tags:  shield capacitive touch unboxing touch-sensor touch-button microcontrollers  

[Diego Spinola] wrote in to tell us about a node communication system he’s been working on called HsNet. The aim is to build a system of nodes that can be made up of small and inexpensive microcontrollers. The problem is that the least expensive controllers often don’t have a hardware UART. HsNet implements the RS485 [...]

Tags:  node hsnet system diego-spinola node-communications spinola rs485 microcontrollers  

Last summer, [Rajendra Bhatt] built himself a simple PIC-based temperature monitor with data logging abilities and recently got around to sharing it on his site. The sensor is based on a PIC12F683 micro controller and measures the ambient temperature on a set interval, storing the values on the MCU’s internal EEPROM. He used a Maxim [...]

Tags:  temperature logger pic-based maxim temperature-logger temperature-monitor micro-controller microcontrollers  

Hackaday reader [Daid] posted in our forums showing off a set of electronic dice he recently constructed. Back in January, we featured a similar set of electronic dice built with an Arduino that was way overpowered as far as [Daid] was concerned. Not satisfied with simply saying it could be done better, he put his money where his [...]

Tags:  daid hackaday reader electronic-dice money microcontrollers  

Okay, now we’re beginning to feel a bit like [Alice]. This tutorial shows you how to simulate VHDL code. This code is intended to run on an FPGA and includes a software-only version of the AVR 8-bit microcontroller core. Essentially, you’ll simulate VHDL code that simulates AVR hardware. Wrap your mind around that! The code [...]

Tags:  code avr vhdl alice fpga microcontrollers  

AVR chips are convenient because you can program them in circuit at their operating voltage. That is, unless you screw up the fuse settings and they’ll no longer listen to an In System Programmer. If you find yourself facing this problem, just build this circuit on a breadboard and ‘unbrick’ by holding down the button. [...]

Tags:  breadboard circuit avr system-programmer fuse microcontrollers  

Gaming industry software engineer [Pedantite] writes in to let us know about his latest endeavor, an AVR based parental assistant timer: Good Times.   Looking for a new project that would be both useful and interesting, his wife suggested a “time out/ time’s up timer”. Like most of us [Pedantite]‘s children are well studied in [...]

Tags:  timer pedantite time count-down-timer software-engineer industry-software microcontrollers  

[Simon Inns] developed this board to act as a radio controlled override for autonomous hardware. It sits between some servo motors and two different sets of controllers for those motors. One set of hardware that can control the motors is a microcontroller programmed for autonomous tasks. In [Simon's] case this enables a sailboat to navigate [...]

Tags:  board radio Hardware simon simon-inns microcontroller sailboat override microcontrollers  

TI has recently been fighting to gain traction in the market of low-cost microcontroller development platforms with products such as the MSP430 Value Line Launchpad.  In order to meet the needs of a rapidly growing customer base and appeal to a broader market they have recently released Grace beta Graphical Peripheral Configuration Tool. Grace is [...]

Tags:  mcu ide market grace development-platforms configuration-tool value-line microcontrollers  

[Pete] was hard at work putting off a repair job for a friend, and wondered how much longer he could possibly procrastinate. With no fellow humans in earshot to which he could propose this question, he thought it would be great if he could ask a Magic 8-ball for an answer. Alas, he doesn’t have [...]

Tags:  burning magic thing pete magic-8-ball repair-job fellow-humans microcontrollers  

The [Dallas Personal Robotics Group] recently put together a set of tutorials for their members, including the build process of a table-top robot, they call the Tiny Wanderer. The bot can be constructed pretty easily, and is meant as an introduction to robot building. The small servo-driven bot uses simple edge sensors to ensure that [...]

Tags:  robot bot simple personal-robotics-group dallas-personal-robotics-group edge-sensors microcontrollers  

[Debraj] wrote to us describing a project he recently completed – a  simple, compact spectrum analyzer using a 16-bit dsPIC microcontroller. The analyzer is fed an analog signal, which is passed through a large resistor followed by an opamp. A DC offset is then applied to the signal, after which it is passed through a [...]

Tags:  signal analyzer spectrum spectrum-analyzer opamp analog-signal microcontrollers  

Here’s a PIC based frequency counter that outputs the count via an RS232 serial connection. [Oakkar7] tipped us off about it after seeing the AVR based counter we featured yesterday. This project is a bit older and a bit dirtier. Inside the metal DB9 housing you’ll find just seven parts. The most important is a [...]

Tags:  serial-connection microcontrollers  

[Q] wrote in to let us know about the AVR-Guide he’s been working on. It looks like he’s finished posting about 80% of the content he planned for in his initial draft outline. We read through several of the sections and found them to be concise, yet able to present information in a way that’s [...]

Tags:  guide avr-guide avr avr-microcontrollers draft-outline initial-draft microcontrollers  

[Aaron] just finished building an online 595 shift register simulator. These inexpensive chips let you extend the number of devices that can be controlled by a single microcontroller. You see them in quite a few LED multiplexing projects, included the Ping Pong Clock that we recently built. But they can be a bit tricky to [...]

Tags:  shift simulator register aaron pong-clock ping-pong shift-register microcontrollers  

[Scott] built this frequency counter using less than $10 in parts. It’s set up to meter frequencies in megahertz which is fitting since he’s planning to use it with his radio hardware experimentation. But we would find it useful too because our cheap multimeter only reads up to around 4 MHz. He’s using an ATmega16 that he [...]

Tags:  worth frequency counter scott hardware-experimentation atmega16 frequency-counter microcontrollers  

[Kenn] is working on building a quadrocopter from the ground up for a university project. Currently, his main focus is building an Inertial Measurement Unit, or rather re-purposing a PS3 Move controller as the IMU for his copter. He previously considered using a Wiimote Motion Plus, but the Move has a three-axis magnetometer, which the [...]

Tags:  playstation quadrocopter ground kenn inertial-measurement-unit imu copter microcontrollers  

[Chris Hulbert] is making it easy for Arduino users to program MSP430 chips with a header file that allows you to compile Arduino sketches for the Launchpad. This makes sense, as the growing number of Arduino sketches available, and the low cost of the TI Launchpad make for a good bedfellows. It’s really wasn’t that [...]

Tags:  launchpad arduino header chris-hulbert bedfellows hulbert microcontrollers  

You can make those buttons on your steering wheel much more functional if you have a way of monitoring them. Don’t even think of cracking open the factory finish to get to the solder points, just tap into the CAN bus and monitor the data traffic. The small board seen above is the result of [...]

Tags:  can button wheel don wheel-button button-presses steering-wheel microcontrollers  

If your boss is like [Michael Scott] you probably find yourself in constant need of plausible reasons for your action or inaction. Now you won’t have to waste away the workday coming up with those ideas yourself because this little box will always provide you with an excuse. It’s actually a 14.4 Kbps modem, which brings back [...]

Tags:  everything kbps modem michael-scott workday inaction microcontrollers  

[R-B] designed a 555 timer circuit to scan a keypad. Keypads are common interfaces for small projects and require row and column scanning by a microcontroller. [R-B's] setup allows you to reduce the number of pins used on the microcontroller to just two. One is an interrupt that is triggered when any of the buttons [...]

Tags:  timer keypad microcontroller timer-circuit keypads microcontrollers  

[Springuin] just posted a tutorial about debugging MSP430 projects using Eclipse. He read our feature about debugging under IAR, a proprietary IDE which TI offers as a code-limited freebie with the TI Launchpad. In that writeup we wondered if anyone would put together a tutorial using open source tools like DDD and GDB to make [...]

Tags:  msp tutorial eclipse open-source-tools using-open-source-tools msp430 microcontrollers  

[Daniel Garcia] sent us a quick tutorial he put together demonstrating how to use an ATmega168 to perform analog to digital conversions. This timely tutorial would make for a nice complimentary project for those of you who decided to build your own digital to analog converter after reading our post from a few days ago. [...]

Tags:  analog tutorial converter daniel-garcia digital-to-analog-converter analog-to-digital-converter digital-conversions microcontrollers  

NXP holds a lot of market share for their ARM based solutions as it is. That’s why we were a little surprised when we found a link on their website announcing that they were giving away free LPCXpresso development boards, based on their Cortex-M0 line. Catches? Unfortunately there are a few to get the board [...]

Tags:  free ARM beer nxp free-beer based-solutions microcontrollers  

Here’s a nice hands-on overview of the Xprotolab, a development board based around the AVR ATxmega32A4 microcontroller. The tiny DIP package includes an OLED display, four tactile switches, and it can be powered via a micro USB connector. The device ships ready to use as a two-channel Oscilloscope, but check out how small it is [...]

Tags:  oscilloscope development xprotolab micro-usb-connector tactile-switches dip-package microcontrollers  

[Embedded lab] has a nice tutorial on building your own heart rate monitor. The monitor works by shining infrared light into the fingertip and looking at the changes in the reflected infrared signal caused by a heartbeat.  The IR detector produces a very small AC signal so a couple of op-amps are used to filter and amplify the signal. [...]

Tags:  fingertip signal monitor heart-rate-monitor ir-detector ac-signal microcontrollers  

Have you ever built a Digital to Analog Converter before? This is a circuit that can take the 0 or 5V coming off of several digital logic pins, combine them together, and spit out one analog voltage that represents that value. If you’ve never made one, here’s your chance. [Collin Cunningham] over at Make put [...]

Tags:  digital analog converter collin-cunningham digital-to-analog-converter analog-voltage digital-logic microcontrollers  

For us the hardest part of any project is coming up with the seminal idea. Once in a while you just need to cheat by recreating an existing product. That’s what EngineersGarage did with this toll plaza project. If you take a look around the various tabs at the top of that article you’ll see [...]

Tags:  system project electronic seminal-idea tabs microcontrollers  

Learning about how infrared remote controls work is a great way to expand your electronics knowledge. That’s because this technology is invisible to our eye, and happening faster than we can comprehend without help from test equipment. This tutorial over at Pyroelectro talks about the theory behind how the data is transferred and shows you how [...]

Tags:  khz tutorial learning ir-communications electronics-knowledge remote-controls microcontrollers  

[societyofrobots] recently posted an Instructable on how to build a voice controlled robot in just a few hours time. This robot isn’t particularly cheap, weighing in at about $230, but it is a fun project if you have the means. The bot is driven around by a pair of servos, taking their directions from an [...]

Tags:  robot instructable voice-controlled fun-project servos microcontrollers  

If you haven’t done any debugging with microcontroller programs [Kphlight] posted a follow-along guide for debugging MSP430 chips. You can see above that he’s using the TI Launchpad and has chosen the free (but code limited) IAR Embedded Workbench that is one of the IDE’s that TI provides for the kit. The example builds a [...]

Tags:  iar Learn msp launchpad iar-embedded-workbench debugging microcontrollers  

Forum user [Frank] shared with us his recent project, a musical alarm clock. More than just a simple alarm clock, his creation allows the user to load music onto a micro SD card, has alarm settings for each day of the week, and best of all, can be controlled using an IR remote. He uses [...]

Tags:  user clock alarm frank clock-forum micro-sd-card alarm-clock microcontrollers  

With more pixels and more objects to track you’re going to need to get that AVR running pretty fast to get the job done. But [Vladutz2000] figured why stop at 16 MHz when you can overclock an ATmega32 to 27 MHz for a faster gaming experience? This build may not be as colorful as Super [...]

Tags:  mhz gaming atmega gaming-experience job microcontrollers  

[NatureTM] sent in a writeup for the MIDI synthesizer he recently built using a TI LaunchPad. The construction is pretty simple overall, consisting of little more than the MSP430, a handful of resistors, and an optoiosolater. Of course, a MIDI controller is required, but he already had that on hand. Once the MIDI data is [...]

Tags:  synth launchpad midi midi-synthesizer midi-synth midi-data microcontrollers  

LaunchPad dev boards from Texas Instruments are cheap and easy to program, making them a great Arduino alternative if you can do without some of the bells and whistles. [ech0s] put his to good use by constructing a Morse code transmitter with dual operating modes. The transmitter can not only encode and transmit messages entered [...]

Tags:  launchpad code transmitter morse bells-and-whistles dev-boards morse-code microcontrollers  

Here’s a way to make sure you don’t leave your Leatherman multitool somewhere. It’s an alarm system that will start a timer when the tool is removed from the holster. After five minutes the module beeps to remind you to put the tool back where it belongs. Annoying? Possibly, but if you’re not done with [...]

Tags:  multitool system alarm leatherman-multitool beeps alarm-system microcontrollers  

This daughterboard lets [Matt Evans] drive a laptop LCD using a Beagleboard. Apparently the Beagleboard gained a VGA header when it moved to revision C but [Matt's] working with revision B4 which is why he had to do all of that ninja soldering with the blue wires. The driver board itself is a thing of [...]

Tags:  lcd beagleboard revision matt-evans matt daughterboard microcontrollers  

This collection of touch sensor information should be of interest to anyone who liked the simple touch sensor post from Thursday. That was a resistive touch sensor and is covered in detail along with AC hum sensors that trigger based on induced current from power lines around you, and capacitive touch switches like we’ve seen [...]

Tags:  touch overview sensor touch-sensors touch-sensor resistive-touch microcontrollers  

[dunk] constructed an easy to use AVR-based USB controller with the ability to drive up to six R/C hobby servos at once.  While the USB-powered Atmega8 he used supplies the necessary PWM signaling for all of the servos, an external power supply rated up to 30v at 3A is necessary to provide the 5v of [...]

Tags:  controller usb dunk hobby-servos atmega8 pwm microcontrollers  

[JB's] driving a Nokia 6100 LCD using an MSP430 with input from a Wii Nunchuck. He’s using the G2211 microprocessor that came with the Launchpad, and developing his code with MSP-GCC. As you can see in the video after the break, this works but there’s some room for improvement. That’s being said, he is bumping [...]

Tags:  lcd nokia nunchuck wii-nunchuck wii nokia-6100 microcontrollers  

We have some beefs about how Texas Instruments does things, the biggest of which is their lack of support for development under Linux operating systems. But if they build it, someone will try to get Linux involved in one form or another. This time around, [BLuRry] put together a guide to developing for the Evalbot [...]

Tags:  evalbot development linux linux-operating-systems beefs texas-instruments microcontrollers  

You’ll never come up short with this measuring tape. That’s because there isn’t actually any tape in the device; it measures distance based on the rotation of a wheel. Roll it across the room and you’ll get an accurate measurement of the distance the little bugger traveled. Like the Etch-a-Sketch from Monday this uses the [...]

Tags:  digital tape distance digital-measuring-tape etch-a-sketch little-bugger microcontrollers  

At the beginning of the Month we came across a coupon code for a free eZ430-F2013 development stick. TI has given these things now and again so we took the opportunity to acquire one. It arrived yesterday and we’ve spent just a bit of time looking it over. Above you can see the first project [...]

Tags:  hands-on month beginning coupon-code first-project microcontrollers  

[Bogdan's] latest project is a box that displays web hits for a chosen site. He calls it the Ego Box because depending on how traffic goes it either bloats or crushes your ego. This provides similar functionality as our Troll Sniffing Rat but the biggest difference is that this is a stand-alone Ethernet device. That’s [...]

Tags:  ego box web bogdan troll microcontrollers  

Ever wonder how to calculate revolutions per minute using a microcontroller? This project shows you how by purposing an IR emitter and detector and a computer fan. As the fan blades spin they disrupt the beam of infrared light between the emitter and the receiver. This results in a waveform on the receiver’s circuit which [...]

Tags:  fan emitter receiver revolutions-per-minute ir-emitter computer-fan microcontrollers  

Unfortunately [manekinen] wrecked a couple of AVRs during his tinkering. Not letting this get him down he decided to blow them up to see what would happen. In exchange for their precious magic smoke the AVRs revealed a good portion of their silicon die. While the details are a little sparse it seems like he hooked them up to a [...]

Tags:  exploding avr avrs magic-smoke silicon microcontrollers  

So you’ve hacked your IM-ME six ways from Sunday but don’t know what to do with the USB dongle? [Joby Taffey] set out to make this leftover a useful part of the hacking arsenal. He pulled off the USB connector and the USB controller chip. From there he glued on the pin headers as pictured [...]

Tags:  controller-chip usb-controller usb-connector microcontrollers  

Here’s a nice little discussion about reading and writing AVR flash memory that [Windel] put together. He’s using an In System Programmer to read the flash memory from an ATmega328 using AVRdude, the programming software which we used in our AVR Programming Tutorials. He covers the particulars of the commands, how this might be useful, [...]

Tags:  memory avr Programming avr-programming system-programmer flash-memory microcontrollers  

Mircrochip has a new USB to Serial converter available called the MCP2200. [Sjaak] suspected that it may have been made from an existing 20-pin PIC and found that reading the device signature with the PICKIT3 shows that the chip is an 18F14K50. Most likely this is running Microchip’s USB stack but it’s hard to tell [...]

Tags:  mcp usb chip usb-stack serial-converter sjaak microcontrollers  

If this is meant for a model rocket it must be the biggest we’ve ever seen. [Scott] and [Trevor] took on the task of building a rocket attitude control system after reading about some research on the topic. But that researcher only tested the theories using simulations so they set out to build their own. [...]

Tags:  attitude rocket control scott trevor attitude-control-system model-rocket simulations microcontrollers  

[Ben Kokes] threw together a hardware package to capture data from a football. In the center of a Nerf football he made room for an accelerometer, gyroscope, and an electronic compass.  All three can capture 3-axis data and, along with the LEDs ringing the circumference, they’ve controlled by an XMEGA192 microcontroller. This makes us think [...]

Tags:  football Hardware data ben-kokes electronic-compass nerf-football kokes microcontrollers  

The folks at [gadget gangster] have been working on an excellent set of tutorials for getting started with the Propeller chip itself, the open-source Propeller Platform Modules and the Spin programming language that’s used to control things. All of the basics and a growing selection of more advanced topics are covered in gorgeous detail, with [...]

Tags:  propeller gadget parallax gangster programming-language microcontrollers  

Here’s an interesting method of reading data off of a NAND flash chip. Often we see these chips desoldered in order to read and write data, but not this time. This method uses hacked adapters to match the pin pitch of the various chips. Above you see parts of a breakout board cut down to [...]

Tags:  method nand reading pin-pitch nand-flash-chips flash-chip microcontrollers  

Those who are familiar with Atmel’s line of 8-bit AVR microcontrollers should already know that some of them have support for external RAM. But have you ever actually used this feature? We haven’t. Now you can learn how it’s done by reading through this guide. It touches on all of the hardware, but doesn’t dwell [...]

Tags:  external ram atmega external-ram atmega128 s-line microcontrollers  

[Maris] wanted a way to read measurements from a digital caliper electronically. He ended up using the TI Launchpad to accomplish this, but not all of the necessary hardware is seen above. The calipers cost him about $7 on eBay, and they have four interface pins which made this hack quite a bit easier. After [...]

Tags:  caliper way microcontroller maris digital-caliper ebay necessary-hardware microcontrollers  

This falling sand game runs on a field-programmable gate array. The Altera Cyclone II resides at the heart of that development board, running the game which was written in Verilog. [Skyler Schneider] modeled his project after a Java version of the game called Pyro Sand Game. He treats each pixel of the 640×480 VGA screen [...]

Tags:  game falling sand programmable-gate-array field-programmable-gate-array falling-sand-game microcontrollers  

Giving a programmer is a great way to get people started in microcontrollers so If you want a cheap simple AVR programmer this might just be what you’re looking for. It combines the V-USB firmware, USBtiny software, a few resistors, and some zener diodes. An interesting trick using this programmer is if your trying to program another 8 pin ATtiny you [...]

Tags:  isp programmer avr zener-diodes usb-firmware avr-isp microcontrollers  

[NatureTM] used part of the Thanksgiving holiday to get composite video output working with an MSP430 microcontroller. He’s using one of the chips that came with the TI Launchpad, which is a big hardware limitation because of the relatively small code memory and RAM. The chip displays one still image at a resolution of 192×40 [...]

Tags:  video msp chip composite-video-output code-memory thanksgiving-holiday microcontrollers  

Learn to manufacture your own solenoids and then use them to play the xylophone by watching the tutorial video after the break. [Humberto Evans] and the team at Nerd Kits do a great job of not only manufacturing the coils, but the xylophone itself. The bars are machined from some aluminum stock and they take [...]

Tags:  Learn tutorial xylophone humberto-evans aluminum-stock solenoids microcontrollers  

[James Bowman] of the Willow Garage published a paper on his J1 CPU core for field-programmable gate arrays. This was originally developed and used for the Ethernet cameras on the PR2 (you know, that incredibly expensive beer delivery system?) robot. It uses a 16-bit von Neumann architecture and lacks several processor features you’d expect a [...]

Tags:  fpga core cpu james-bowman willow-garage von-neumann-architecture field-programmable-gate-arrays microcontrollers  

[Lucidscience] is back again, this time showing us how to push data to a VGA monitor from your AVR project.  It turns out that it is pretty simple, requiring only n open port and a few resistors and diodes. Well, it is that simple for the most basic version which gives you 56×60 pixels. Of [...]

Tags:  vga lucidscience avr avr-microcontrollers vga-monitor diodes microcontrollers  

[Rossum] developed a host board that makes it easy to drive a TFT screen using an inexpensive microcontroller. He’s looked around at a bunch of LCD’s that are easy to get your hands on and decided that the iPod Nano 2G screens are the right balance of performance (176×132 TFT) and low cost ($1-$5). They’re [...]

Tags:  video tft smartlcd nano tft-screen microcontroller ipod-nano microcontrollers  

[Pyra] was looking for a way to reprogram some ATtiny13 microcontrollers in a SOIC package. He’s re-engineering some consumer electronics so adding an ISP header to the design isn’t an option. He had been soldering wires to the legs of every chip but this is quite tedious. What he needs is an adapter that can [...]

Tags:  soic build clip soic-package pyra microcontrollers microcontrollers  

[Joby Taffey] takes the prize for the first completed homebrew game for the IM-ME. Over the last few weeks we’ve seen [Travis Goodspeed] working with sprite graphics, and [Emmanuel Roussel] developing game music for the pink pager. But [Joby] didn’t really use either of those. [Travis'] sprites were using a framebuffer that fills up a lot [...]

Tags:  im-me joby game travis-goodspeed travis emmanuel-roussel dungeon-crawler game-music microcontrollers  

[Riley Porter] posted a picture of his EvalBot USB power hack. In the photo above we’ve put a box around D6 and D7. The development board ships with a 0 Ohm resistor in the D7 location, patching in power from the USB-B connector labeled USB DEVICE. He found that by moving that resistor to D6 [...]

Tags:  evalbot resistor power riley-porter ohm-resistor board-ships microcontrollers  

[Matt] was looking for a challenge. Inspired by the machine gun setups on World War I planes he wanted to make a gun that can shoot between the blades of a spinning propeller. The original guns used an interrupter gear that synchronized machine gun firing with the engine mechanically. [Matt] set out to do this using [...]

Tags:  gun machine propeller matt synchronized-machine-gun planes microcontrollers  

Last month we asked you to send in your debounce code. You didn’t disappoint and it’s time to share the code received. There were some guideline for sending in code so if you don’t see yours here, it probably didn’t follow the rules, sorry. We also tried to weed out code that using delay loops [...]

Tags:  code didn debounce microcontrollers  

[Stan] built this LED matrix using a 16×16 grid of RGB LEDs. He built the hardware and wrote some subroutines to randomize the colors. He’s not using PWM because frame buffering is not feasible for the 1k SRAM limit of the ATmega168 he used. Instead, shift registers drive the lights which can be mixed to [...]

Tags:  led rgb matrix stan tetris shift-registers pwm subroutines microcontrollers  

Like us, you probably have piles of old PS/2 keyboards occupying strategic positions in your house and causing all sorts of trouble with the neighbours. As luck would have it, there is a way to put those lazy peripherals to work! Our friends in the Czech Republic have successfully interfaced a PS/2 keyboard to an [...]

Tags:  keyboard discovery ressurects czech-republic ps-2 piles neighbours microcontrollers  

[Emmanuel Roussel] is coding a version of Tetris for the IM-ME. Before you get too excited, he hasn’t actually written the game yet, but instead started with the familiar theme music. The IM-ME has a piezo speak on board so it’s just a question of frequency and duration. [Emmanuel] developed an Open Office spread sheet [...]

Tags:  im-me preparation music emmanuel tetris emmanuel-roussel spread-sheet theme-music roussel microcontrollers  

In the last installment of our tutorial series we built a simple circuit on a breadboard and programmed an ATmega168 to make it run. That proves that you know how to follow directions, but the eureka moments of doing everything yourself are on the way. This time around you will get down and dirty with [...]

Tags:  code avr Programming breadboard how-to-follow-directions microcontrollers  

Pogo pins – spring-loaded pin contacts are pretty fun to play with and even cooler when they get used in electronic devices like Adafruit and SparkFun’s test jigs. Check after the break for how these two companies have created their own production hacks. At Adafruit, they build up from an Arduino with a proto shield. [...]

Tags:  pogo test adafruit pogo-pins sparkfun test-beds microcontrollers  

Arguably, Microchip’s PIC microcontrollers do not get enough posts here. One of the drawbacks for some of us is that Linux support for PICs is not very well known. The information is out there, but no one has laid out the process of going from writing C code to programming a chip. Written for Linux [...]

Tags:  pics how-to linux pic-microcontrollers using-linux c-code microcontrollers  

It’s fun to pick apart code, but it gets more difficult when you’re talking about binaries. [Joby Taffey] opened up the secrets to one of [Travis Goodspeed's] hacks by disassembling and sniffing the data from a Zombie Gotcha game binary. We looked in on [Travis'] work yesterday at creating a game using sprites on the IM-ME. He [...]

Tags:  im-me game hacking travis-goodspeed travis goodspeed sprites zombie microcontrollers  

Here’s a study in sprite animations that [Travis Goodspeed] put together. He’s working with one of his favorites, the pink IM-ME device that he’s been hacking on for a while now. But if you don’t have this hardware that shouldn’t discourage you. There’s a lot to be learned from his methods which will translate to [...]

Tags:  im-me manipulation study travis-goodspeed graphic-manipulation goodspeed sprite microcontrollers  

[Frank Zhao] put together a USB business card. It’s even got the instructions printed right on the silk screen of the PCB explaining how it should be used. He based the design around an AVR ATtiny85 microcontroller. It runs the V-USB package that handles USB identification and communication protocols. The rest of the hardware is [...]

Tags:  business card usb frank-zhao communication-protocols silk-screen business-card microcontrollers  

That’s it… the controller and the video game system all in one. This is the standalone version of [Rossum's] RBox. We looked in on the prototype in June but that was using a bulky development board. You can see the CR1632 button battery, which powers the device for about four hours, sandwiched in between the [...]

Tags:  smallest gaming ever video-game-system button-battery standalone-version microcontrollers  

What takes eight hours to solder and uses more shrink tubing that you thought imaginable? An LED matrix installed in a real pumpkin. When I mentioned that we’d like the LED pumpkin in last Friday’s post scaled up to a full LED matrix I had no idea it would be me doing the work. But [Caleb] [...]

Tags:  led matrix pumpkin jack-o-lantern what caleb eight-hours microcontrollers  

You may be able to write the most eloquent code in the history of embedded systems but without a way to run it on the hardware it will be worthless. In this installment of the tutorial series we will: Look at some of the available AVR programmer options Place the microcontroller on a breadboard and [...]

Tags:  Hardware avr Programming avr-programmer breadboard microcontroller microcontrollers  

We love looking at hardcore electronics projects with a beefy microcontroller and hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of code at its center. But everyone needs to get there somehow. This tutorial series aims to make you comfortable programming the Atmel AVR line of microcontrollers. Whether you’ve never touched a microcontroller before, or you’ve cut [...]

Tags:  avr Programming microcontroller atmel-avr electronics-projects microcontrollers