Fixing A First Generation GuruPlug’s Cooling Problems

October 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

[Doragasu] had been using a hacked Xbox as his file server but upgraded to a single board Linux device when the GuruPlug was released. Unfortunately the first run of these devices had an overheating issue, which resulted in reboots even at moderate CPU load. The design was changed from a passively cooled heat sink to an internal fan, but that didn’t really help those who already had one of the early models. Above is [Doragasu’s] method of cooling down the overheating computer.

The original sink — which was really just a fin-less metal plate — was removed and replaced with a proper heat sink. This makes contact with the ARM, RAM, and Ethernet chips. They were all coated with thermal compound before installation and a silent fan was added to help whisk away the heat. This still fits inside of the original case, but to make way he did remove the original power source and cut a hole to allow for air movement.

The post also details an external LCD screen used to display system information. It’s along the same lines as this USB LCD screen project which inspired him to send us a link to the project.

Driving An LCD Character Display Using Custom HID Codes

October 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Here’s an external display meant to help you keep track of your computer’s status. It connects via USB and is driven by a PIC microcontroller. It listens for a small set of commands, using those to implement a simple control protocol to drive the screen.

[Andrew Gehringer] designed the device around a PIC 18F2550, which offers native USB control. He’s using Microchip’s USB stack to enumerate the module as an HID device. It listens for commands 0x10 through 0x23. These clear the display, write strings to each of the four lines of the display, and switch the LCD backlight. Of course the project includes a program [Andrew] wrote to feed the display. It has a GUI which let’s him decide what information is displayed and how it is formatted. This helper app hangs out in the system tray for easy access.

LVDS On An FPGA Could Make It Possible To Reuse Laptops LCDs And The Like

October 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

Search around the Internet and you’ll find a landfill of forum threads asking how to drive the LCD screen from a dead laptop. The answer is always that there is just no way to do it. That’s because most of them use a Low-Voltage Differential Signalling protocol that just isn’t available through the hardware used in hobby projects. But the appearance of this board could signal that things are about to change. We don’t want to get your hopes up too much. This isn’t an open source project, but it is a piece of hardware that can make LVDS available for the 8, 16, and 32-bit microcontrollers you’re used to working with.

It’s a derivative of a project [Thomas Jespersen] worked on for a customer. It uses an FPGA to implement the LVDS standard used by high-pixel-count LCD displays. It contains enough memory for a full frame-buffer, and includes a Motorola-8080 communication standard. [Thomas] gives a full description of how the setup works in the video after the break. Demonstrations start about 7:30 into the video with an STM32 F4 Discovery board driving the display.

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Classic Game Of Snake On An ARM Controller

September 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Every now and again we take a break from looking at all of your awesome projects and get to work on our own. I thought I’d take a minute to show off my game of Snake. It’s a classic that I remember playing on a graphing calculator (TI-83) back in high school. I had never written my own version and decided it would be a good reason to spend some more time on the ARM platform.

The dev board I’m using is the STM32 F0 Discovery board. Once I had a usable template for compiling the code on a Linux box everything else just started to fall into place. The screen is from a Nokia 3595. Several years back I cut off the keypad and made a breakout board for it. It’s pretty dim but it’s small and uses SPI so it tends to be my go-to display for prototyping. But I did get my hands on an SSD1289 TFT screen (after writing about this project) for about $16 and I’ve had some success with that. It uses a parallel interface so it’s not as easy to hook up and I’ve had some crosstalk issues when running at 24 MHz.

But I digress. Check out the demo video of my simple game after the break. There are more details about my programming choices at post link above. You will see this hardware again soon. I’m working on an On Chip Debugging primer and these ARM dev boards are perfect for it!

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How To Build Your Own Dedicated Pandora Radio

September 20, 2012 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

This mix of modern and retro acts as a standalone Pandora client. It’s certainly a radio upgrade, falling somewhere in between the passive listening of traditional broadcasts, and the complete control of music players that use playlists.

Inside the wooden case a BeagleBoard does most of the work. It’s running Ubuntu 12.04 on which pianobar, a command line interface package for Pandora is running. Those components alone would make a pretty nice listening experience, but since Pandora rolls different music into the mix it’s nice to be able to see what you’re listening to. The four-line LCD is wide enough to display plenty of information. It’s being controlled by a PIC24 microcontroller which also monitors the controls on the top. As you can see in the video after the break, the user interface offers almost everything you could want. It’s easy to switch stations, and you can still register your preferences on each track being played.

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Sculpting With LCD Pixels

September 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Each one of the small squares in this sculpture is actually an LCD cell, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. What you see here is just a small portion of the sculpture that spans multiple floors of the atrium at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. It’s made up of multiple panels hosting a total of 3600 LCD cells. We first saw it way back in April, but now there is a ‘making of’ video which you can see embedded after the break.

The project took about 18 months to complete, starting with a 256 pixel prototype. That served as proof that the non-lit hardware would achieve the look they were going for. From there they designed the code which would generate patterns on the sculpture and used it to drive a digital model (we’d bet that was to get the go-ahead and funding). The fast-motion footage of the three-man assembly line formed when soldering up the circuits is fun to watch, the real nail-biting stuff comes when they start mounting the fragile panels in the space.

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Hackathon Results In The Facebook Book

July 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Jeremy Blum] and [Jason Wright] pose with their project at the end of a 24 hour hackathon. The Facebook headquarters in New York City held the event as part of their Summer of Hack program. As an homage to the hosts, the hacking duo decided to create a physical book and populate it with the virtual Facebook. And what do you call such a creation? The Face(book)^2.

The video after the break gives the best overview of the hardware, but here’s the gist of it: They started with the largest hardcover book they could find, hollowing out its pages to house their own hardware. When you open the book it calls back to a computer over an Xbee link with a request for data. The python script on the computer pulls the newest from a Facebook feed, sending it back to the book to be displayed. There is a graphic LCD and four character LCDs built in for this purpose. There’s also an accelerometer which is used for detecting page turns when the cover is jostled. The rest of the interactivity is provided by a few tactile switches mounted next to the smaller LCD screens for navigation and the ‘like’ feature.

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