Fresh hacks every day
An awful lot of microcontroller projects use timers to repeat an action every few minutes, hours, or days. While these timers can be as accurate as a cheap digital wrist watch, there are times when you need a microcontroller’s timer to measure exactly, losing no more than a few milliseconds a day. It’s not very hard to get a … Read the rest
Here’s an interesting tip that can help improve your ability to write assembly code. In an effort to remove the complexity of assembly code for an AVR project [Quinn Dunki] figured out how to use macros when writing AVR code with the GNU toolchain. Anyone using AVR-GCC should keep this in mind if they ever want or need to … Read the rest
[Steve] created an AVR programmer using an old USB keyboard. We feature a bunch of AVR programmers, but this one is made from parts that many people will have lying around. There are two components: the controller PCB from a USB keyboard, and an optocoupler for emulating key presses.
In order to send data to the AVR, [Steve] used … Read the rest
Wanting to test his skills by building a webserver [Cnlohr] decided to also code a Minecraft server which allows him to toggle pins from inside the game. The rows of switches seen above give him direct access to the direction register and I/O pins of one port of the ATmega328.
The server hardware is shown in the image above. It’s … Read the rest
[Stu] has a teenage niece whose birthday is coming up and he wanted to give her something unique as a gift. He’s working on an LED matrix pendant that can display pixel graphics, play animations, and scroll messages.
He began the work after drawing inspiration from the TinyMatrix project. That clever design uses a DIP AVR chip soldered directly … Read the rest
[blueHash] uses this cheap development board as an AVR programmer. What’s interesting to us is that it solves the chicken-or-egg problem that is usually encountered when bootstrapping a programmer. We’ve written about this issue before. Most programmers use microcontrollers, which first need to be flashed using a programmer. But it turns out the chip on this dev board has … Read the rest
Every AVR microcontroller, from the ATtiny in your thermostat to the ATMega in your Arduino, stores its configuration in a series of fuse bits. These fuse bits control settings such as the multiplier of the internal oscillator (and thus the speed of the chip), or if the reset pin can be used as a GPIO pin. [YS] just put up … Read the rest
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