This dot matrix is a great project for Arduino and dot matrix display newbie’s. Fun part is that this project doesn’t use a regular Arduino board, but instead it is assembled on a breadboard with ATmega168 with Arduino bootloader. Project uses a temperature compensated RTC clock with internal crystal chip DS3232 that gives great accuracy (±2ppm in normal conditions).

Clock is as it is without ability to set time – so there is place for improvement and design. This clock can be powered by two 10F 2.5V super caps that allow RTC clock running for several days.

Today’s electronics allows doing many things, you wouldn’t dare to imagine few years ago. Most of sensors became compact and cheap, so every hobbyist can make wonderful and practical things on a low budget. Playing around with Alcohol Gas sensor sounds really interesting as it has some practical use… we all know what is this about, isn’t it?

Sensor itself is very simple to connect – it requires one ADC input of Arduino, and depending on amount of Alcohol Gas in your breath output voltage changes that can be interpreted in ether way like in this case with bar of 10 LEDs. This is very simple and inaccurate way and only may fit for parties to make drinking more fun (if it can be considered a fun thing).  Ok, now it’s time for testing!

If you are a beekeeper this project can be a good start towards better beekeeping. It is based on PIC32 microcontroller and has tons of sensors and interfacing that allows controlling many parameters in order to sustain near ideal conditions in a bee hive. If you know a little about bees, the probably you are aware about bee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), when number of worker bees drops and this way rest of them aren’t able to maintain hive.

So it is better to prevent this factor than fix damage later. This is where PIC32 based monitor (so called PIC’n The Beehive) comes in. It monitors ambient and hive temperatures, humidity, rain, dew point, wind speed, relative air pressure, and daylight intensity. It is also capable of measuring hive and bee weight and Mite count as well. Due to condition changes controller can ventilate hive, regulate temperature, entrance opening. It also can simulate rain to keep bees inside. All data can be accessed via multiple interfaces like USB, RS232, RF channel and even via WEB interface. This is what modern bee life should look like

It may sound little bit crazy, but yeah – you can play Rock Paper Scissors alone…with your glove. OK this isn’t just regular glove, but really hacked glove that can compete with you in this simple but catchy game.

Glove is equipped with Arduino Mini Pro board that is equipped with triple axis accelerometer that is already mounted on breakout board from sparkfun. Also it has couple of flex sensors for detecting positions of “scissor” fingers. It works fine, but seems that it can be simplified with less expensive parts. Anyway this is great toy to beat time.

Continuing with its endeavor to deliver low cost micro controller hardware development platform, NGX has now launched a new low cost prototyping platform for LPC1768 series of mircocontrollers. LPC1700 are ARM cortex-M3 based micro controllers. The platform is named BlueBoard-LPC1768-H and costs only $32.5

BlueBoard-LPC1768-H is a breakout board for LPC1768 cortex-M3 based microcontroller. The LPC1768 microcontroller has 512KB of internal flash and 64KB RAM. Ethernet MAC, USB Device/Host/OTG interface, 8-channel general purpose DMA controller, 4 UARTs, 2 CAN channels, 2 SSP controllers, SPI interface, 3 I2C-bus interfaces, 2-input plus 2-output I2S-bus interface, 8-channel 12-bit ADC, 10-bit DAC, motor control PWM, Quadrature Encoder interface, 4 general purpose timers, 6-output general purpose PWM, ultra-low power Real-Time Clock (RTC) with separate battery supply, and up to 70 general purpose I/O pins

Board can be purchased from
http://shop.ngxtechnologies.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=65

Following are the salient features of the board.
* Dimensions: 94.08×54.48 mm2
* Two layer PCB (FR-4 material)
* Power: USB powered or can be powered through the DC jack, 5-7.5V input
* reset switch
* Test LED
* 32Khz crystal for RTC
* On board 258kb I2C EERPOM
* Extension headers for all microcontroller pins
* USB B-type connector for powering the board
* 20pin – JTAG connector

Probably you know that programming Arduino is easy task even for novice. So if you are just starting electronics and looking towards robotics, this Motorduino might be a great starting point.

This board equipped with all necessary interfaces to start with various motors including regular and servos. It also allows easily adding various sensors without additional need of Arduino shields. Despite various peripherals, Motorduino is still compatible with additional standard Duemilanove shields just in case you need more interfacing or expanding. They are working on final tweaks before letting board out. Stay tuned.

This TV terminal made by Vassilis Serasidis has been around quite some time and served lots of people as a great project or at least as reference to new designs. If you missed it – you just need to check it out. Well this TV terminal can completely replace any indicator that you usually use in your embedded design.

So TV terminal is capable of displaying 40 chars in 25 lines or 80×75 points in semi graphical mode. TV terminal is built around ATmega8 microcontroller that is clocked at 20MHz and it is still a trade off because originally 22MHz would be needed. Despite sending info to TV device also accepts keystrokes from standard PC keyboard and data from RS232 channel. So this makes device pretty universal which can act as a TV display controller for other embedded projects or simply accept data from PC via RS232 interface.

If you are starting with microcontrollers you are probably looking for simple guides or examples how to drive one or another peripheral with microcontroller like AVR.

In the internet you will probably find tons of information and examples how to drive standard 20 character x2 line text LCD. But hey – one more wouldn’t hurt to check you as probably in each new tutorial you can find something new and useful.

Are you feeling tired of paying large electric bills? Probably you feel that some tweaking in home electric system would save couple bucks. So why not to try, but for this you will probably need a power level monitor to determine where are biggest usage of electric. Building power level monitor can be quite easy – there can any microcontroller be used for this. In this case a LPC2138 ARM7 microcontroller has been chosen which, I think, probably is too powerful for such simple task.

The simple idea of design is to sense current and step down voltage to level acceptable to MCU IO ports. The current sensor is made of transformer with some modifications. Device detects zero crossings of voltage and current in order to determine the phase shifts so it could calculate power RMS correctly. Power level information can be viewed in two ways – via 7 segment LED indicator mounted directly on device or it can be sent via USART to monitor it computer screen and probably so some statistics. The full project can be downloaded here.

This clock has some modern and retro taste as it integrates nice old wooden box and an electronic alarm clock with Graphical LCD.

Clock is controlled by ATmega32 microcontroller. Time, date and alarm are displayed on 128×64 standard GLCD. Its backlight also has some intelligence – the value of photocell determines when to turn backlight on. Clock settings are managed via simple menu, where you can set time, date, alarm clock, backlight values and see “About this clock” info. Putting modern things in unusual “retro” looking cases makes them really attractive.

Computer has become a part of our lives. So why not to make it more attractive? Simple LED lighting in fan makes it look cool. But what if make light changing fan? CalcProgrammer1 has built a nice color changing fan with four bright LEDs mounted in corners.

The project includes the whole fan speed controller with RGB led control built around AVR microcontroller. Microcontroller monitors fan RPM, controls LED fading and communicates with PC program where in simple graphical interface you have ability to adjust fan speed, and manually select RGB intensities of each LED with sliders. This is a great base project for PC case modders.

There are times when you want to record one or another phone conversation so later could listen again. Don’t know if this is necessary to do, but if so, here is a standalone phone conversation recorder project based on PIC microcontroller. Device is powered from USB and actually sends voice data to computer where software compresses audio to MP3 format for compact storing.

Device automatically detects when phone is picked up so could start recording automatically and stops recording when phone is hanged.

This phone recorder is robust enough to set and forget. PC software is simple but pretty informative where you can see the duration of conversations and other statuses like WAV conversion to MP3. Once you need to listen to record, just go to directory and select one you need. Be sure not to violate the human rights with this.

Dev Boards are great stuff especially for newbie’s and for prototyping tasks. Internet is overcrowded with dev boards especially with mega series microcontrollers. But still you may be looking for other pin and interface layouts that seem more convenient for you.

So, this one isn’t very different comparing to other. It has all necessary parts included like ISP header, all port pins with markings, RS232 level converter. Well, one thing is a bit different – board has additional high power voltage controller – simply speaking ULN2803A that can be switched ON and OFF with 8 DIP switches. So I say this is great choice if you need to drive some high power devices directly from board. There is no other power converters included, but it can be easily powered via PC power jack – no problem to power ATmega8 with 5V and ULN2803A with 12V. No SMD parts used, that makes easy to build for everyone.

Would you like to get rid of multiple remote controls at home? Why buy one if you have some brain. As housing an old Nintendo GameBoy could be perfect choice where you already have buttons and Graphical LCD in place.

Only simple add-on made of IR transceiver and ATtiny44 has to be attached to GameBoy port that converts received IR data in to serial that can be sent (and received) to GameBoy Advance. Adapter is compatible with all 38 and 36KHz devices. Remote signals can be sampled directly from original remote controls and recorded in memory. Then commands can be sent via nice Graphical interface. Is it convenient enough – you decide…

There are several complete and free AVR boot-loaders around internet, but this one can be great choice as it has nice and intuitive graphical interface. It seems that it is tested on very few AVR’s, but should work on other too.

Boot program for chip is written using codeVisionAVR where free evaluation copy should be enough to compile. And another part is a Windows (works on Win 7) application that is available as Academic Free License. Bootloader itself is capable in programming Flash and EEPROM files and talks via COM port.

For this project you need a light tower with red, yellow, green and blue color lamps and Wavecom GSM module. All this stuff can be bought on ebay if needed. Anyway this is a great project to make cool effects by switching lights remotely by sending simple SMS.

Light bulbs are controlled via Opto22 board with 12V optical switches that allow controlling of 12V bulbs safely. Relay board and SMS terminal is controlled by obsolete AT90S2313 microcontroller board that can be easily replaced by ATtiny2313.

Digital effects are cool addition to electric guitar. In this project made by colin353 effects pedal is based mainly based on recording guitar sound to RAM and the mixing or doing other manipulations with real signal on the output via op amp.

Of course PIC16F877 has not enough ram to do recordings of sound that comes from ADC, so external 23k256 of RAM is used that gives enough of memory to do recordings for special effect modes like “loop”, “burst”, “kill” and “bypassed”. As author says, once hardware is ready, there is free highway to do software modifications for including such effects as delay or echo.

I bet remotely controlled submarines are really fun stuff as you can explore underwater world without getting wet. Jason’s built underwater ROV submarine is very original solution as its layout is based on PVC pipes.

It seems that design is still under strong development. Despite its first successful tests under water submarine will be upgraded to more flexible platform with things like leak detector, temperature and pressure sensors, air lift balloons,  torpedo, sonar, grabbing arm, artificial horizon, compass, joystick control, AVI video recorder. All these add-ons will require a MCU to controls all bunch of sensors and parameters. But while project is in development, you can see current version of sub in action here. Let’s hope we will see finished version it.

What is good about WiFi radio? Actually it removes the limits of location. You can listen to the radio channels from around the world in pretty high quality. Regular radio is limited to some range from transmitter antenna, this way you can hear mostly local broadcasts. Internet radio isn’t new thing – even wireless radio boxes have been around for a while. You can easily get one for less than $100.

If you are a little bit geeky just build one. In this project various parts from different electronics are used like WL-520gu router, USB audio adapter, VFD display and ATmega8 which ties things together. When put everything in nice black box – it seems that you couldn’t get better looking from store.

This idea might seem a bit crazy, but it’s real. Matthew have built a bidirectional serial terminal with standard PS/2 keyboard input and 54×24 resolution oscilloscope screen. Adapter is built around ATmega168 microcontroller that reads keyboard commands, intake UART communications and generates video signal sent to scope.

As a result you can see a 7-bit ASCII and 60Hz refreshing image in oscilloscope screen. The terminal works like professional one with most features available including graphical configuration menu, selectable baud rate and configuration profiles. Despite the simplicity of hardware, it is a time critical application. For resolution of 54×24 characters AVR has to be clocked at 20MHz. After all, the result looks great. Author even managed to connect a Linux box to its Terminalscope.