Peripherals Hacks

1529 Articles

Parts: 4×4 RGB Button Pad Controller SPI

March 9, 2009 by 2 Comments

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We covered SparkFun’s new RGB button pad controller a few weeks ago. This is a full-color clone of the monome interface; a 4×4 grid of buttons with tri-color LEDs underneath. Each LED has 24bits of color control, for more than 16million color combinations. Up to 10 panels can be chained together to create huge button grids, like SparkFun’s Tetris table. We previously used a smaller version in our RGB combination lock.

We asked SparkFun to send us the SPI version of the button controller to test. This is a new product developed in-house at SparkFun, with open source hardware and software. Read about our experience interfacing this board below.

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Putting A Digital Picture Frame To Work

March 3, 2009 by 29 Comments

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[Tobe] shares living accomodations with a few other people, so he built this tool to help them all communicate. using a Samsung SPF-83v wifi enabled picture frame, he’s made a central location for things like shopping lists and messages. He uses PHP for the database accessing and writes it all to an image using gd. Every 15 minutes a cron job runs that pushes the updated image to the picture frame.

Breath Controlled Guitar Hero Kick Pedal

March 2, 2009 by 24 Comments

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[Ben Heck] the uber modder has posted a new project. He has made a breath controlled kick pedal for all of the Guitar Hero style games. Though the tutorial focuses on Guitar Hero World Tour, he does explain how it could be done for Rock Band at the end. This is intended for someone in a wheelchair who couldn’t actually use the kick pedal and needed their hands free to play the rest of the drums. He took apart the kick pedal that came with it to get the piezoelectric switch out of it. Then, he made a little chamber and placed the switch on a diaphragm at one end. When you blow, the diaphragm moves and triggers the switch. Pretty simple really. There is a video available of [Ben] trying it out as well.

AVR Mega8 RSS Reader

February 26, 2009 by 16 Comments

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[Barney_1] built this sereial RSS reader. He’s using the Dragon Rider 500 development board, which is a kit that has expansions available including the LCD, serial interface, and power supply. You don’t need the kit though, you could just build your own with similar specs. He has written a program in python to scrape RSS feeds and send them to the LCD. He’s got some specific workarounds for the Dragon Rider board if you do have one. You can download the firmware and source code on his site.  You can see a video of it after the break.

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LCD Repair

February 18, 2009 by 42 Comments

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[Andrew] sent us this great breakdown of an LCD monitor repair. After his wife’s monitor developed an issue with rippling in the picture, he was forced to decide between trashing it, or fixing it. He decided for the latter, possibly to his wife’s disappointment. The rippling image could easily be attributed to a failed filter in the power supply. Knowing that capacitors are a prime suspect in these cases, he tore in, looking for failures. He found that there were, in fact, 2 bad capacitors on the back light circuit. After replacing them with newer, higher quality ones, the monitor was as good as new.