AVR Light Controller

January 30, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

halogen

[Matthias] sent us this project where he builds an AVR light controller. He had a halogen bike light laying around, but was unsatisfied with its lead-acid battery. He wanted to use a lithium-polymer battery but found that they can’t be used directly with halogen lamps due to their voltage. His produced 8.5 volts at full charge and can’t be discharged to below 5 volts. He new a power controller would be necessary to try to flatten that out for his lamp, which needed to stay between 6-12 volts.

He used an ATtiny45 doing PWM to change the voltage. Some other cool features he added were the high and low settings and an LED status light for warnings. You can find pictures, schematics and source code on his page as well as tons of great information. Great job [Matthias].

ATtiny Breadboard Headers

January 18, 2009 by Eliot 22 Comments

attiny

[Alex] was frustrated by the amount of time it took to start prototyping with an AVR ATtiny. To make things easier, he built headers that carry the 8 and 20 pin chips and plug directly into breadboards. The boards include a 6pin ISP header, resonator, pull-up resistor, reset, and blocking caps. The ATtiny2313 version also has a serial connection header. This is a prototype though, and he forgot to route one of the connections. He plans on having a large batch of boards ready for next month.

CUIduino, Arduino With True USB Support

January 17, 2009 by Eliot 11 Comments

cuiduinotop

The CREATE USB Interface (CUI) was a project that came out of UC Santa Barbara around the same time the Arduino was being developed. It has a USB port, a PIC18F4550, and a prototyping area. It was designed to enable easy interfacing with the real would through many A/D inputs and general I/O ports. It supports both OSC and MIDI-over-USB natively. The biggest difference between the CUI and the Arduino is its USB support. The Arduino uses an FTDI chip to create a serial interface to its onboard AVR. The CUI’s PIC has native support for USB. That means you can have the CUI appear to be any USB HID device you want: keyboard, mouse, game controller, etc.

The Arduino has a friendly development environment and a large following though. CUI create [Dan Overholt] decided to add an ATmega168 to his board to get the best of both worlds, the CUIduino (scroll down). It can be programmed just like any other Arduino compatible device, but the having the CUI parent means your Arduino project can behave like a native USB HID gadget.

[Thanks Peter]

Wireless BlinkM Control

January 10, 2009 by Eliot 5 Comments

blinkm

[John] has been working with several BlinkM RGB devices. He’s created a controller to talk to each of the BlinkMs wirelessly and change their behavior. The core is an old relay tester box used to test telephone circuits. Each of its four knobs are connected to the analog inputs on the Arduino. The signal is transmitted using RFlink devices. Each BlinkM is paired with an ATmega168 and receiver. The control box also has a switch to send the same signal to all of the devices at the same time. The transmit and receive code are available on his site. You can find a video of it embedded below.

Continue reading “Wireless BlinkM Control” →

25C3: Solar-powering Your Gear

December 27, 2008 by Eliot 10 Comments

solar

The 25th Chaos Communication Congress is underway in Berlin. One of the first talks we dropped in on was [script]’s Solar-powering your Geek Gear. While there are quite a few portable solar products on the market, we haven’t seen much in the way of real world experience until now.

Continue reading “25C3: Solar-powering Your Gear” →

RepRap Motherboard

December 24, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

reprapmb-1

When the RepRap team found themselves pushing the limits of the Arduino, they started looking for alternatives. They found it in the ATMega644P. It has four times the memory and four times the RAM compared to the ATMega168 used in the standard Arduino. It also has 32 I/O pins. They ported the Arduino software to the microcontroller and started producing Sanguino boards. Now that the base design is nailed down, they’ve begun expanding it to their specific purpose. Pictured above is a prototype RepRap motherboard. While the Sanguino is barebones, this board has onboard connectors for all of the RepRap’s motors, so you can just plug it in. It is also designed to support the future Generation 3 electronics. Probably the most interesting feature is the SD card slot. The goal is to eventually have a board that can run the RepRap without a host computer if necessary; it will manufacture designs directly from the flash card.

WiFi Streaming Radio

December 19, 2008 by Eliot 9 Comments

wifiradio

[Jeff] is continuing to work on his WiFi streaming radio project and is now into part 7. The reason it’s taken so long is because he’s bothering to document every single piece of the system instead of assuming too much of the reader. The core of the system is an Asus WL-520GU wireless router. It is supported by OpenWRT and has a USB port for use with an external audio card. mpd, Music Player Daemon, is used for playback. This latest part features adding an LCD display for the current track. The router board already has points for the serial port, so it’s just a matter of adding an AVR to talk to the LCD. The next step is building a simple user interface and then boxing everything up. You can view a video of the display below.

Continue reading “WiFi Streaming Radio” →