Reverse Swear Box Curses (For) You

If you are running out of swear words to comment the magic smoke coming from your electronics, [Howard] has just the right weekend project for you: The reverse swear box. Most swear boxes would have you drop in a coin as penance for uttering your choice phrases. Instead, at the touch of a button, this obscure but classy device randomly suggests a four letter swear word and displays it on a 14-segment LED display for immediate or later use.

It’s built upon an ATmega168 and only requires a minimum of external components. The schematics and firmware for this project are freely available on the project page. There’s also an extremely profane header file, packed with 37 case-insensitive four-letter words you may not actually want to include in your toolkit. On the other hand, many of these words score intimidatingly well at Scrabble.

LED Array Uses Ridiculous Amount Of 14-segment Displays

What do you do if you see a bunch of 14-segment LED displays for sale for a penny a piece? [Fritzler], when faced with that conundrum did what any of us would do – he bought 64 14-segment displays and built a huge 16×4 alphanumeric display (German, here’s the translation).

[Fritzler] found a cache of old East German 14-segment displays for €0.01 at electrobi.de (don’t bother, they’re out of stock), and the only thing he could think of was building a gigantic display. He used ULN2803 Darlington drivers for each LED module, but there was still the issue of controlling the entire display.

For that, [Fritzler] decided to make his 16×4 use the same protocol as the Hitachi HD44780 LCD controller. This meant [Fritzler] could wire up his gigantic, power-hungry display to a microcontroller as if it were a simple LCD display.

An amazing amount of work went in to the creation of this display, as evidenced by a pair of pictures showing what [Fritzler] had to solder.

Thanks [freax] for sending this one in.