[miceuz] has a friend that works as a theatre technician, and in the course of his job he often needs to jigger with various stage components while shows are in progress. As you can imagine, the lighting situation is far from ideal, so he asked [miceuz] to build him an adjustable lighting solution for his tool box.

The circuit itself is relatively straightforward, using an ATMega88 to provide the PWM required for dimming and color control. Input is taken from three different sources, a rotary encoder for color selection, a pot for brightness control, and a button to turn the light strip on and off.

[miceuz] says that while project came together pretty easily, it still presented some issues along the way which provide some useful design reminders for beginners (and some veterans) alike.

First and foremost: debounce, debounce, debounce. [miceuz] forgot this mantra and made a mad dash to add capacitors to his design after etching the PCB to ensure that his inputs were not bouncing all over the place. He also noted that one should always be sure to read the ADCL before the ADCH register when decoding ADC data. His final observation is that using thick traces is the best policy whenever possible – he ran into a lot of issues with traces detaching during assembly, which he had to rework with wire and solder.

In the end, his friend was happy with the result, and [miceuz] is a better hacker for having worked through his issues. What sorts of important/useful lessons have you learned through the course of your projects? Be sure to share them with us in the comments.

Wow. And furthermore, WOW! Just looking at that clean prototype you know that a lot of work has gone into the project, but when you hear this chiptune MIDI device you’ll really be impressed. We know what you’re thinking, but really, you’ve got to hear this to appreciate the quality [Linus Akesson] achieved in this synthesizer. You can catch it after the break.

He does a great job of showing off the different waveforms that can be produced by the ATmega88 on this board. But there’s much more. It also serves as a 16 frame, 16 channel sequencer for creating and layering your own loops.

He mentions that eight oscillators are used for the waveform generation. We don’t see hardware for this on the board. Either we’re missing it, or these oscillators are being created with software? If you have an idea of how this works please clue us in by leaving a comment.

[Thanks 7e]

[Hugo] went all out when sharing his findings while reverse engineering this small LED marquee. He purchased the 29×7 LED matrix for under $12 but was surprised to find that the USB connector wasn’t a standard type and didn’t come with a cable. He first soldered a standard connector in place and then set out to make the device do his bidding (translated).

What he accomplished can be seen in the video after the break. He can now connect to the device via a USB cable, sending it new messages and adjusting the speed at which it scrolls. He can also adjust the spacing between letters, reverse the scrolling direction, read the on-board buttons, and write the settings to the device’s EEPROM. This is all thanks to some alternative firmware that [Hugo] wrote for the ATmega88. You can download a copy of that code from the wiki page he put together (translated). We really appreciate the time he spent putting that page together. The wealth of information he gathered during the hacking process serves as an example of the best way to share your projects with the world.

Unfortunately [manekinen] wrecked a couple of AVRs during his tinkering. Not letting this get him down he decided to blow them up to see what would happen. In exchange for their precious magic smoke the AVRs revealed a good portion of their silicon die.

While the details are a little sparse it seems like he hooked them up to a high (and possibly reverse) source to blow open the chips casing. From the pictures it looks like he was able to reveal some of the flash or SRAM (the big multi colored rectangles) and what could possibly be the power supply. Be sure to checkout the videos after the break for some silicon carnage.

[Johannes Agricola] recently held a workshop at the Peace Mission in Goettingen, Germany where he shared his RGB LED flowers. The small round PCB hosts an ATmega88 microcontroller which is running the V-USB stack so that the unit can be controlled by a computer. Each flower blossom is an RGB LED connected with four enameled wires which, when twisted together, make up the stem of the flower. [Johannes] took tons of pictures during the assembly while offering soldering advice along side the illustrations. The PCB is single-sided helping make this a great project for someone trying out surface mount component soldering for the first time. Or if you want something a little more free-formed try out this lemon-juice powered LED flower.

This little board serves as a current gear indicator for a motorcycle. It was designed with the Suzuki V-Storm motorcycles in mind as they have a sensor built into the gearbox. Other gear indicators rely on sensors on the shifters themselves, but reading the voltage level from a gearbox sensor gives much more reliable information.

The voltage measurement is handled by an ATmega88 microcontroller which in turn drives the 8×8 LED display. Also built into the system is a temperature sensor and photoresistor. The firmware takes advantage of both of these inputs, displaying temperature when in sixth gear or at the push of a button, and dimming the display based on ambient light. There are also settings for screen rotation, and user preferences.

We didn’t find schematics or software but this should be pretty easy to replicate. If you need a primer for AVR programming we’ve got you covered.

[Thanks Michal]

Here’s a bit of simple home automation using hacks with which we’re become pretty familiar. [Mrx23] combined OpenWRT, a microcontroller, and a set of RF controlled outlet switches to add automation to his plug-in devices. An RF remote that controls the switched outlets has been connected to an Arduino. The router communicates with the Arduino via a serial connection. And the router is controlled by a web interface which means you can use a smartphone or other web device to control the outlets.

The best thing about this system is the power that the router wields. Since it has an underlying Linux kernel you have the option of setting CRON jobs to turn lighting on and off, and group settings can be established to set up a room’s lighting level for watching movies, hosting guests, etc. Combine this with the fact that OpenWRT can use port forwarding for Internet control and the possibilities really start to open up.

[Thanks Arpad]

Inside this box you’ll find a La Fonera wireless access point. [Emeryth] and his band of miscreants built this portable device for WiFi security testing. The AP is running OpenWRT and has been set up to use the 16×4 character display as a terminal. An ATmega88 connects the LCD as well as six buttons to the UART of the La Fonera. From there, a set of Ruby scripts takes care of the communication protocol. As you can see after the break, this setup allows you to scan the area for WiFi, showing channel, SSID, and MAC information. Although not specifically outlined in the video we suspect there’s some more devious tricks up its sleeve too.

This thrift shop organ gets a new life as an 8-bit music maker. Called the Chipophone, it relies on an ATmega88 to produce sounds that you might associate with classic video gaming. [Linus Akesson] takes us through all of the different sound settings in the video after the break, including performances of your theme music favorites.

The original organ uses transistor logic making it rather easy to patch into the hardware. Thanks to the build log we know that [Linus] used 74HC165 input latches to monitor each of the switches for the 120 inputs. Fifteen of these latches work like a backwards shift register 74HC595, cascading all of the parallel inputs into one serial signal. From there the microcontroller takes over, monitoring the keys, pedals, switches, and potentiometers and outputting the appropriate sounds.

[Thanks 7e]

[Sprite_TM] outgrew the features of the cheap unmanaged TL-SG1005D switch he was using on his home network. Instead of buying a new and much more costly switch he cracked the cheap one open and found that the RTL8366SB chip inside possessed the ability to work harder but was crippled for sale as a low-end model. It wasn’t as easy as that oscilloscope firmware upgrade we saw a while back. He had to add an AVR ATmega88 to send I2C commands to the switch. Turns out that the I2C protocol wasn’t standard and after much head scratching he found some Linux drivers for the chipset that gave him enough info to send the configuration commands he needed. Now he’s go the managed switch he needed for his VLAN for the cost of a microcontroller and some wire.

We’ve had a few folks send us info about their vehicle display hacks after seeing [Will O'Brien's] motorcycle computer a few days ago.

On the left we have a display for an electric vehicle. [S1axter] is using a 4.3″ TFT screen to display charge information for each battery cell in the car. An ATmega88 collects the data and sends it to a breakout board with an LCD controller on it.

To the right is a display from a Formula Student project. a Matrix Orbital GLK19264-7T-1U LCD display provides a lot of real estate for displaying data. Right now [Alan] is still in the early prototyping stages, but the video after the break demonstrates the RPM readout using a function generator. It’s not shown in the video, but he tells us that he’s since tried it out with the engine and has a PIC 16f877 reading temperate data from the electronic control transmission sensors in addition to the RPM data.

Correction: Thanks to [j] for correcting our mistake. This is a Formula Student car.

Above is a new demo video called Phasor developed by [Lft]. It is run from an AVR ATmega88 and a few passive components, and the result is pretty amazing. [Lft] goes into detail about the tricks he used to get this up and running. The chip is clocked at 17.73447 MHz which is exactly four times the frequency of the PAL color carrier wave which allows him to fake a smooth signal. He also uses a timer trick to get the voltages that he needs. The work done here is beyond hardcore and quite frankly we can’t believe he managed to fit all of this into 8.5 KB of program space with just 1 KB or RAM. We wonder if there’s enough room there to add sound and color to the AVR Tetris project.

[Thanks Sprite_tm]

[Sprite_tm] dusted off his assembly skills and managed to emulate a Z80 computer using an AVR ATmega88. He’s using an SD card in place of the floppy and a 128 KB DRAM chip to handle the memory for the emulated machine. An FT232 board gives him terminal access which he uses for input and display. As you can see, the hardware is much simpler than building the original would have been. He makes up for this with complicated firmware. In the end, the emulated core occupies about 2 KB of programming space after he followed the Z80 Propeller project’s idea of dividing the instructions into different modules and using a lookup table to access them.

The headphone remote for the third generation iPod shuffle has a special chip that identifies it to the iPod itself. [David Carne] posted an in-depth report about the process he used to reverse engineering that protocol. He’s discovered that the remote uses a peculiar signal to identify it as authentic when the device powers up. We’ve talked about Apple’s use of peripheral authorization before and it seems this is no different. [David] did manage to emulate the authentication using an ATmega88. If you’ve got a shuffle 3G sitting around this info will allow you to operate it with a microcontroller in your next project.

In a previous job, [sprite_tm] was responsible for wrangling many different LED text ad marquees. The hardware was fairly simple and he always figured they could be pushed much further with a little work. He recently acquired ten 32×16 LED displays a decided to see what he could do with them. By the end of the project, he had full motion video running on the display. This is a great project to read up on if you’ve ever wondered about LED matrix displays. He starts by reverse engineering the electronics on the board. He then attached an ATmega88 to drive the display module. Multiple display modules were daisy chained together over serial. The article covers PWM control and refresh timing as well. Check out one of a few demo videos below.