Looking for an interesting project to do using an Atmel Mega644? Students at Cornell University have got you covered. They were required to choose, design, and build a project using the microcontroller; and this year is quite promising with video object tracking, the always popular theremins, helicopters, Potentiostats, even Pavlovian conditioned mosquitoes, and more.

Of course all the previous years are included as well, making over 350 projects total.

[Thanks Bruce Land]

Download: buspirate.v0c.zip

A few weeks ago we wrote about our Bus Pirate universal serial interface tool. We used the recent holiday to add some new features, like a JTAG programmer, macros, frequency measurement, and more. A major code reorganization makes everything easier to read and update.

Check out the a demonstration of the new features below. We’re compiling a roadmap and wish list, so share your ideas in the comments. You can also see how we used the Bus Pirate to read a smart card and test-drive an I2C crystal oscillator.

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[Cliff] sent in [N5ESE]‘s junk box project page. Most of the projects are amateur radio specific, but one that caught my eye was his capacitance checker. If you’ve ever been looking through a pile of small, unlabeled caps, you know the value of a capacitance meter. This one is fairly simple and uses the AC setting of your multimeter to indicate the capacitance of the unknown component.

FPGA’s have become especially useful to the hacker community of late. Once upon a time, these lovely pieces of dedicated hardware were fabled to only be within reach of deep pocketed graphics card producers working to up their shader and vertex counts. Today they’re often found in the bowels of high end network gear. As reprogrammable arrays of logic gates, FPGAs represent a happy middle ground between general purpose CPUs and dedicated silicon. After the break, we’ll recount some of the more interesting FPGA projects we’ve seen, like the open source graphics card we featured yesterday.

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