LED matrix pendants

led-matrix-pendants

If you want to mess around with some microcontrollers but don't really have a purpose in mind this project is perfect for you. It's cheap, easy to assemble, and there's blinking LEDs! [TigerUp] shows us how he  put together some LED matrix pendants using just five components. He calls the project Tiny Matrix, which is fitting as the pendant outline is barely 0.5" by 0.7". On the back an … [Read more...]

Stellaris Launchpad library to drive the TM1638 UI board

tm1638_stellaris_launchpad_library

For those that grabbed one of these TM1638 UI boards you can now easily use it with your Stellaris Launchpad. [Dan O] took it upon himself to publish an ARM library for the UI board. There's not a lot of new stuff to talk about here. We've already seen this being driven by an FPGA. [Dan] also links to both an Arduino and an MSP430 library for the board. The one thing that is good to know is … [Read more...]

Nook Simple Touch as a glider computer

xcsoar-glide-computer-on-nook-simple-touch

Look at the beautiful screen on that Nook Simple Touch. It has a lot of advantages over other hardware when used as a glider computer running the open source XCSoar software. The contrast of the display is excellent when compared to an LCD or AOMLED. That's quite important as gliding through the wild blue yonder often includes intense sunlight. The display is also larger than many of the Android … [Read more...]

Malting kiln controller for preparing beer brewing grains

malting-kiln-controller

A quick primer is in order: when it comes to hobby brewing there's two main types, extract brewing and all-grain brewing. The former uses a syrup that has been extracted from the grains at a factory while the latter adds the steps to do this yourself. But in both cases the brewing grains have already been malted. This is a careful process of soaking the grains and then kiln drying them. [Richard … [Read more...]