Building An Up-to-date MSPGCC Toolchain

June 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Sergio Campamá] wrote in to tell us he’s assembled a guide for compiling the latest release of MSPGCC. This is a cross-compiling tool chain for the popular MSP430 line of microncontrollers. We used a version available from the Ubuntu repositories when developing with the TI Launchpad and the eZ430-F2013.

Installing from repositories is easy, but you don’t get the newest features and often newer hardware isn’t supported. [Sergio] reports that the newest version, called Uniarch, pulls source code and header files from the middle of this month and supports over 300 devices. In fact, it specifically outlines the goal of making new hardware easier to incorporate than with previous versions. He’s tailored this guide specifically for Ubuntu but while we were wading through a Google search we also found a page that outlines compilation for OSX.

We didn’t really notice before, but GitHub sure does make those README.md files look nice when viewed on the web, doesn’t it?

XBMC Controller Is An All-in-one Usb Solution For HTPCs

June 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

On the original Xbox, XBMC was a software-only solution (assuming you had a chipped or soft-modded console). That’s because the Xbox was already meant to connect to a television and work with an IR remote control. Now that the XBMC software has transitioned to focus on a wider range of hardware, it may be more complicated to get the same functionality on an HTPC. Realizing this, [Dilshan] developed a USB connected XBMC controller that features an IR receiver, character LCD, and a rotary encoder with two buttons.

As long as your HTPC has a way to connect to the audio and video inputs on your TV, this should take care of the rest of the presentation. LCD screens were popular with XBMC from very early on because modchips included an interface. Because of this, XBMC is already setup to provide navigation and media information this way. So you can use XBMC for audio playback without needed to have your TV turned on. Add to that the ability to control your box with either a remote control or the navigation tools on the front bezel and you’ve got a winning solution.

You can download an archive that includes all the info about this device over at the project repository. For your convenience we’ve embedded the schematic and PDF description of the project, which we found in that package, after the break.

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Lose The Beer Belly By Brewing Beer

June 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

If you’re milling your own grains for that next batch of beer you might be able to melt all of those extra calories away while you’re at it. [Eucherboy1] repurposed an unused exercise bike to power his grain mill. The propane tank is serving as a weight to hold the base of the mill in place; it’ll be used later when boiling the wort. A belt transfers power from the bike to a wheel replacing the hand crank on the mill. Check out the video after the break to see [Euchreboy1] working up a sweat. We think there’s much room for improving the gear ratio of the setup. Or he can just man up and push through the pain.

We’ve gotten used to seeing ways to power a bicycle, like using wood-fired steam, or even by incorporating a chainsaw. But the hacks that use a bike as a power source are a bit less common. Our local hackerspace made a bicycle blender a while back. Got any projects of your own that are bike powered? Send them our way!

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ATtiny13 Powered Handheld Helicopter Game

June 26, 2011 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Owen] just finished putting together a portable helicopter game. It’s pretty impressive, especially since he used an ATtiny13 microcontroller. That chip uses an 8-pin dip package, offering only five I/O pins (six if you use the reset pin) and 1k of programming space.

The game runs on a small cellphone-type LCD screen. The helicopter remains somewhere in the center column of the screen as the maze that makes up the game board approaches one step at a time. The single button that controls the helicopter will raise it with each step of the maze when held down, or allow it to fall when released. The player’s progress is shown as a hex value in the upper left corner of the screen. When you hit a wall, your score will be shown next to the high score for the game and will be saved in EEPROM if it’s a new record. As the game progresses, the maze gets harder based on the score. Check it out in a video clip after the break.

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Pulse Width Modulation With Microcontrollers

June 26, 2011 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

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 you’ll also find it used in many other applications such as servo motor control and piezo speaker control.

[Daniel] starts off with a brief explanation of duty cycle, then moves on to some examples of hardware and software PWM. Many of the AVR microcontrollers have a hardware PWM feature that allows you to configure a pin that toggles based on a target timer value. This is demonstrated using an ATmega168, but a method of using interrupts and your own code is also covered in case you don’t have a hardware PWM pin available.

Digitized Retro LCD Games Played Using An Arduino As A Controller

June 26, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

This one’s a bit abstract. Remember those LCD games that became quite popular sometime in the 1990’s? You know, the ones that had only one game, usually a character that could be moved back and forth to catch, hit, or block objects falling from the sky or being thrown by some villain? [Tobie Nortje] sure remembers them and has built an Arduino controller to play virtual versions of the games.

He started off by finding a website that is digitizing the old games. That is to say, they’ve taken images of each state of the LCD, then implemented the game play using those images and an approximation of the original physics. Unlike NES or Sega Master System games the ROMs of these devices can’t just be dumped because of the specialized screen. Instead, a virtual version of the hardware has been built into a web interface.

[Tobie’s] part of the hack is to use an Arduino and a few buttons as the controller. It’s easy to set up and we think the breadboarded controller approximates the size and weight of an LCD game pretty well. Check out the video after the break and let us know what you think in the comments.

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A Badge Without A Conference

June 26, 2011 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

We saw this one a few days ago when it was first bouncing around the interwebs but never took a close look at it. Today, when we ran across a direct link in the tips box it was the promo video (embedded after the break) that won us over. Once you dig into the particulars of The Verbalizer we think you’ll agree that this is a hackable conference badge without the pesky need to attend a conference.

As you probably guessed from the design of the PCB, this is a microphone. It’s intended for use with Google’s new voice search feature, and connects to a computer via a Bluetooth module. But really it’s just another roll-your-own Arduino with a few extra bits. You’ll find an ATmega328 and an FTDI chip which provides a USB connection for programming. The real fun starts with the microphone and speaker circuitry which is just waiting to be breadboarded at home. We found a few other things while poking around in the schematic (available by downloading their Product Docs and Schematics package). It looks like there’s some capacitive touch… you what? Isn’t it more fun if you find this stuff yourself, kind of like the hidden gems of the DEFCON badges?

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