[Alex] put together this handy cheat sheet to make pinout lookups much quicker. It covers the most common chips from the AVR line, ISP headers, and FTDI cables.

[Alex] put together this lovely minimal LED project. The square pixel matrix is soldered directly to the microcontroller in the same style as EMSL’s Micro-Readerboard. During the prototyping phase he used resistors to limit the current from the programming board. The final product doesn’t use resistors and manages the current draw by only turning on a single pixel line at a time. The illustrated assembly guide is very thorough and should help your create an equally compact device. Check out a video of it in motion below.

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[Alex] built what he calls a light to sound converter. It reacts differently depending on the type of light: remote controls, light bulbs, TV screens, etc. A photodiode is used with an amplifier to pick up the light change. That signal is dumped through a dual opamp. He swapped in several different types of photodiodes and settled on the BPW34 intended for visible light. He’ll be incorporating this into a much larger project.