Regarding Atmel’s Xmega chips

A few years back Atmel announced a new line of chips, the XMega series. We see the name bouncing around here and there, but when [Michael Kleinigger] mentioned that he’s seen very few project using these chips we realized that not only is he right, but we know next to nothing about them. Just give his XMega review post a Read the rest

$14 swarm robot, kilobot, is extremely cool

Reader, [Michael Rubenstein], sent in a project he’s been working on. Kilobot, as stated in the paper(pdf), overcomes the big problems with real world swarm robotics simulations; cost, experiment setup time, and maintenance. The robot can be communicated with wirelessly, charged in bulk, and mass programmed in under a minute. Typically, robots used for swarm research cost over … Read the rest

Programming an ATtiny using an Arduino

attiny

[Scott] is a big fan of the Arduino platform, and he’s not afraid to admit it. It does all the things he needs, but now and again he would like to use something a bit smaller, without all the bells and whistles the Arduino has to offer. He contemplated using an ATtiny for smaller projects, but after looking into … Read the rest

Small POV device shows off some big features

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 … Read the rest

Blackberry LCD reverse engineering

blackberry_lcd

[Scott] was looking to source some LCD screens for an upcoming project, and was considering buying them from SparkFun. While the Nokia panels they sell are not expensive, they aren’t necessarily the cheapest option either – especially when building in volume.

He searched around for something he could use instead, and settled on Blackberry screens. Old Blackberry models were … Read the rest

Webcam images processed and played back on LED display

[Mathieu] has bee working to refine the code running on an LED matrix, and added some neat display tricks along the way. He wanted to make the display directly addressable from a computer. The 96×64 bi-color LED display is powered by an Atmel FPSLIC and already used double-buffering. Enabling a PC to write directly to one of the buffers … Read the rest

Reverse Engineering LED vodka bottle displays

wireless_led_marquee

When [Tyler] heard about the LED matrix display that Medea Vodka was building into their bottles, he immediately wanted to get his hands on one. Who could blame him? Someone had finally combined two things we love dearly: booze and LEDs.

He struggled to find a bottle at any of his local stores for the longest time, but was absolutely … Read the rest