[jelengar] liked the ease of use of the Arduino, but wanted a much higher pin count. He set about converting the ATmega Controller for use with Wiring, the code that the Arduino IDE is based on. The ATmega128 in the controller features 53 pins as opposed to the 11 on the Arduino’s ATmega168. You also get 128kb of memory. The process is fairly simple; you just need to add the appropriate crystal. You can also add a switch to trigger the bootloader and a status LED.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXCA8SM9nS4]
While the iPhone 3G included several new features that its predecessor lacked, one thing it did not include was a dock. Instead of shelling out $30 to buy Apple’s iPhone 3G dock, [Roland] and the folks at Geeky-Gadgets.com decided to design their own cardboard iPhone dock. While this doesn’t include any fancy features like dock connectors or audio line-outs, it looks like a quick and budget friendly way to give your iPhone 3G a place to charge and sync.
WEEE Man is an art display that has been roving around England. No, he doesn’t walk or talk. He is here to remind us of how wasteful we can be. Hackers rejoice, we’re part of the solution. It also doesn’t hurt that he is Seven Meters tall and over three tons. WEEE Man looks awesome, but are we the only ones that spotted stuff and thought “ooh, I could have used that for a cool project.”?
[via The Presurfer]
Apparently you can revive dead Ni-Cad batteries by zapping them with high voltage. Some people have used welders in the past, but many of us just don’t have access to one. This project shows you how to hack a disposable camera into a battery revival device. This could be very cost effective. A single regular AA battery could revive many Ni-Cads. Remember, this doesn’t charge them, just makes them able to be charged again.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfVTCSYekso]
[Jordan] sent us his Rocket Camera project. It really isn’t much that we haven’t seen before, but we thought many of you would be feeling the effects of gravity a little harder today. So when your belly is stretched to its limits with Turbaconducken and you don’t think you can stand, take a little flight with [jordan]. Careful you don’t lose your lunch on the way back down though.
[Moritz Waldemeyer], a favorite artist of ours, has a brand new project. He went wanting to design a 3D version of the game Operation. The piece he ended up with is called Keyhole Surgery. It’s essentially the laparoscopic version of operation. The player guides a metal key through the passages of a translucent block while attempting not to touch the walls. A counter on the side displays how many hits it has detected. The player with the smallest number wins. We love the modular potential of this project: the number of layers could be increased, the order could be changed, and more.
Make has assembled a buyers guide for the many different types of Arduino devices. The Arduino is an open hardware platform designed to make prototyping easily accessible. The design allows for other people to modify, expand, and improve on the base, and many people have started producing their own versions. The guide features a lot of the hardware we’ve covered in the past like the LilyPad, Arduino Pro, Sanguino, Duemilanove, Ethernet Shield, and Freeduino.
Out of the pack, the Seeeduino (pictured above) definitely caught our eye. It’s a low profile SMD design much like the Arduino Pro. They’ve taken advantage of the space saved by the SMD ATmega168 by adding more useful headers. In addition to the ICSP, you get the pins in UART order and an I2C header. Vcc is switch selectable for 3.3 or 5volts. The reset switch has been moved to the edge plus two additional ADC pins. Our favorite feature is the new spacing on the digital pins. Arduino digital pin headers have an inexplicable 160mil gap between the banks. The Seeeduino has the standard row for shield compatibility, but has an additional row spaced at standard 100mil spacing for use with protoboard. At $23.99, it’s competitively priced too.
