[Scott] Made A Single-chip Hellschreiber On Earth

August 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

[Scott Harden] is drilling teeth by day and designing radios that send secret messages by night. He’s set his sights on the Hellschreiber protocol which was used by the Germans in World War II along with their Enigma encryption system. The protocol is a viable alternative for transmitting and receiving code in environments with too much background noise for other communication systems.

His goal was to develop his own transmitter using just one microcontroller. He picked an ATmega48 and coupled it with a 40 MHz crystal oscillator. [Scott] mentions that there is no other hardware necessary, but static messages stored in an array so you’d need some other hardware to push your own characters through via the chip’s UART or otherwise. The AVR sends messages by converting the data into audio using PWM. That signal is fed into the crystal oscillator, which produces an amplitude modulated signal (AM) that can then be transmitted.

Check out his video after the break for a demonstration. He’s decoding the transmitted data using a free program called Ham Radio Deluxe.

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Small POV Device Shows Off Some Big Features

April 26, 2011 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

We’ve already added the components needed to build [Rucalgary’s] tiny POV device to our next parts order. The little device sets a new standard for tiny persistence of vision boards. Instead of relying on the user to find the best speed and timing for swinging the board around, [Rucalgary] used an accelerometer. This is the point at which we’d usually groan because of the cost of accelerometers. We’re still groaning but this time it’s for a different reason.

The accelerometer used here is a Freescale MMA7660. It’s an i2c device at a super low cost of less than $1.50. The reason we’re still groaning is that it comes in a DFN-10 package that is a bit harder to solder than SOIC, but if you’ve got patience and a good iron it can be done. An ATmega48 drives the device, with 8 LEDs and one button for input. On the back of the board there’s a holder for a CR2032 coin cell battery and a female SIL pin header for programming the device.

Check out the video demonstration embedded after the break. We love it that the message spells and aligns correct no matter which way the little board is waved.

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Laptop LCD Reused In Beagleboard Project

February 7, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

This daughterboard lets [Matt Evans] drive a laptop LCD using a Beagleboard. Apparently the Beagleboard gained a VGA header when it moved to revision C but [Matt’s] working with revision B4 which is why he had to do all of that ninja soldering with the blue wires. The driver board itself is a thing of beauty, hosting a DS90C363 LVDS serialiser as well as some buffer chips that handle level conversion for it. He’s also included an ATmega48 so that he has some options for future improvements.

The LCD is mounted in a custom acrylic case, with Beagleboard and driver board taped to the back of it. There’s RS232 and a USB hub which opens up the possibility of using a WiFi dongle for communications. So far he doesn’t have much functionality other than displaying images on the screen but there is some talk about using a touchpad for control. We’d love to see a touchscreen overlay, transforming the build into a proper ARM-based tablet.

Chest Freezer Temperature Controller

November 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Mikey Sklar] finds himself in need of a temperature regulated refrigerator for fermenting foods like yogurt, kimchi, bread, and beer. After some testing he found that by building his own controller he can get a chest freezer to outperform an upright refrigerator at this task by 2-to-1.

The controller is based around an ATmega48. It includes a remote temperature sensors which you can see connected to the lower left header in the image above. On the back of the board there’s a relay used to switch the freezer’s power on and off. [Mikey] is selling a kit but the hardware and software for the project are both open source so build it yourself if you have the know-how.

A chest freezer is a great place to store Cornelius kegs… we’ll keep our eyes open for one.