[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLWAWtpcelM]
[kero905] sent in this project he’s working on. It is an open source hardware converter to connect Wii controllers via USB. It uses an Arduino for its brains. It is still in development, the only controllers that work are the nunchuck and the classic. He notes that there are enough extra pins left to adapt to an arcade controller fairly easily. The code is available on the site, as well as a rough parts list.
The folks over at NKC electronics didn’t waste any time with this one. They sent in the MEGA shield for the Arduino MEGA. We just posted the story of the Arduino MEGA yesterday, so that was pretty fast.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories spotted one of the first images of the Arduino MEGA. The board is based on the ATmega1280 microcontroller, which has 128KB of flash,4KB of RAM, and 4KB of EEPROM. We haven’t seen any official specs yet, but the silkscreen shows 12 PWM connections, 36 Digital I/O, and 16 analog inputs. The post mentions 4 hardware UARTs and an I2C bus as well. No release date yet, but we can assume it’s soon since the hardware was already demoed at ETech.
Related: We added an Arduino category.
While playing with an ATmega168, [Jeff] programmed the RSTDISBL fuse bit. This pretty much makes the chip useless in most cases. [Jeff] didn’t want to give up on it though, so he built a system to program it using the rarely used high voltage parallel programming mode. He used an Arduino, a few lines of code and a few spare parts to make it. After sharing the idea with some fellow programmers, he decided to make an Arduino shield specifically for this purpose. You can use this to reset almost any fuse to rescue a chip. If you are a die hard AVR person and never started using Arduino instead, the STK500 actually has this built in.
[Chris] sent in the Thermosmart. It is an Arduino controlled thermostat. It has a web interface which allows him to see the current temperature and make adjustments from remote locations. He can set heating or cooling to on, off, or auto and adjust the ranges as well. We’ve seen similar done with an Arduino before, even one with a nice LCD interface. This could possibly be useful for remote plant monitoring as well.
[scott] had a need to capture a mouse and wanted to learn about how to program an arduino, so he built an Arduino controlled mousetrap. It is made from things he had laying around the house, like some Tupperware containers and wooden rods. The program is pretty simple, when a trip wire is touched, the servo jerks the wooden rod out of the way, closing the container. You can see it working after the break. The trip wire seems like a big failure point. he states that it is just a wire, slightly above a tin foil strip. That seems like it would only be a tiny area that the mouse would need to touch to trigger it. What better switch could he design as cheap and quick as possible?
The AVR STK500 has been Atmel’s standard AVR development platform for many years. Recently though, hobbyists have embraced the Arduino. [Alessandro] has decided to bring the two together so that you can use the Arduino environment with the STK500. Unlike the Arduino, it comes with 8 LEDs, 8 switches, a variable power supply, and variable analog reference. It’s a great way to get hardware you might already have back into service.
