Follow along with this project and you could use your PSP as a display for your computer. The software, available for download on the site, gives you a 960×544 display. The data is compressed, sent to the PSP, then decompressed for display. Though that sounds clunky, the video after the break shows it working pretty smoothly with some Winamp visualization. Only 32 bit Windows XP or older is supported currently.
[Bob] has a USB page hit counter that uses an ATtiny25 to run a MAX7219 which drives eight 7-segment displays. It is easy to implement USB on an AVR using just firmware, eliminating the need for any USB to RS232 conversion. The host software is written in Delphi and sits in the Windows tray. The code examples seem simple enough to expand upon into your own display programs.
We’re always looking for people to contribute posts daily and help expand the site. We’ve added a handful of contributors in the last couple months, which you can see in our new How-tos.
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[photo:fbz]
[Matt Daughtrey] sent us this sweet little project he’s doing for Halloween. He’s building some animated LED eyes. He says that the whole thing is 3 individual LMDriver platforms, another project he’s working on. There isn’t any info available about that, but he does expand a little. He states that each display module uses an Atmega169 with some heavy multiplexing. The eyes really don’t look that impressive sitting on the bench, but watch the video to see how cool they really are.
We noticed that the back of the boards appear to have http://www.embeddedether.net on them. Unfortunately that site seems to have been grabbed by a domain squatter.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8KprTVbHD4]
Wondering what we did with our web server on a business card project from last week? It’s powering a giant LED graffiti wall. Animations can be user-submitted using the online designer. You can watch a live feed of user animations as well. The online interface runs on the Google App Engine for maximum scalability and resilience.
In today’s How-to we cover all the ins and outs of building your own networked graffiti wall. Continue reading “How-to: Networked Graffiti Wall”
[Jacques] sent us this little project he has been working on. It is an amazingly cheap USB 2 chanel scope. The total cost of the project was around 5 Euros. It is based off of an Atmel Tiny45, has 2 analog inputs, and can supply 5 Volts to a breadboard. He has listed the bill of materials as well as downloads for the source code, plans, and display software.
We welcome the swarm of autonomous hovering robot overlords being made by students at Humboldt University. The goal of this project is to build an autonomous hovering platform that is controlled via adapted insect behavior. Navigation comes from monitoring real time inputs, such as air pressure and optical sensors, not by predefined paths and GPS coordinates. Some examples of this adapted behavior are: navigation via polarized sun light like African ants, and optical flow similar to bees.
You can see the platforms in action on Spiegel Online, but unless you understand German, you won’t get much else out of it.
If any of this seems familiar, it’s because we covered CCCamp 2007, which was near Berlin and had some very similar quadcopters. While the large quadcopter platforms have been around for a while and are steadily coming down in price, there are some new alternatives out there that are quite tempting. Anyone want to build some autonomy into this little baby?
[thanks fh]
