Fresh hacks every day
[Haris Andrianakis] just finished building this very clean-looking vacuum fluorescent display clock. It shows six digits using IV-11 tubes, and also has a half-dozen RGB LEDs to spice things up (check out the video after the break for an example). An ATmega168 drives the device, controlling the display and serving as a battery-backed real-time clock. As with any tube-based clock there's a … [Read more...]
[Robert] put together his own illuminated coasters that know when they hold a drink. They look fantastic, thanks to professionally produced PCBs and a layered, laser-cut acrylic case. They're much like the pagers given to restaurant-goes who are waiting for tables, but this version is much fancier (and doesn't include the vibrating/paging feature). The RGB-LED board is a previous project which … [Read more...]
[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 code so that it's portable for all AVR controllers. This module is one of the least … [Read more...]
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 hardware is very simple - a photoresistor is pointed at a computer monitor and reads bits … [Read more...]
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 strip board. He's using his own Java application for laying out circuits on this … [Read more...]
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 is the most commonly used method for dimming an LED, and that's [Daniel's] example in this tutorial. But … [Read more...]
It's graduation time for many high schoolers, and while many students would love to decorate their caps, administration generally looks down upon this practice. [Victor], however, thought of a way around this. The human eye cannot see infrared light, but camcorders generally can. Putting these two concepts together with a couple of infrared LEDs, [Victor] was able to make a cap that displayed … [Read more...]
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