Use A Nokia N82 TFT Panel With Your Arduino

August 21, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 16 Comments

[Andy] has been hard at work reverse-engineering the Nokia N82 2.4 inch cell phone display for use with an Arduino. As pointed out in the article, this same 2.4 inch display can be found in at least seven other Nokia products, so they are readily available. The panels can be found for as low as 3 pounds (or a little less than 5 dollars) on Ebay.

The results are quite good and can be seen in the videos after the break. The first demo displays a simulated weather report, and the second displays some JPEG images. Although an Arduino Mega was used in this demonstration, a standard Arduino can be used as well. Schematics as well as a bill of materials is included in the article, however if you’d rather just buy a board, he’s selling the rest of what he’s built on a first come first served basis. No word on how many he has in stock though!
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Recorder Controlled Snake Game Played On A Nokia 6110

April 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Dig out an old cell phone, hit the dollar store for some plastic recorders, and build this sound controlled snake game for your next party. The project will be a snap for those comfortable working with microcontrollers, and a great learning experience if you’re looking to try your first Arduino project.

[László] and his friend call the project the Snake Charmer. As shown in the clip after the jump it uses music notes to direct the path of the solid line in the classic cellphone game of snake. But this isn’t just some PC-based rip-off. They’re playing on the actual cellphone. A camera points at the screen to project it for the enjoyment of spectators. The control scheme uses relays soldered to the pads of the four directional buttons. The pitches are being detected by a Max/MSP program, with the corresponding commands pushed to the Arduino via USB. Yep, it’s overkill but the point was to get this up and running quickly and with a minimum of work. We’d say they succeeded.

Actually, now that we think of it, this isn’t a two player game. Perhaps the recorder control concept needs to be applied to a more modern version of the game.

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Resurrecting A Cellphone With Blown USB Circuitry

March 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Script] is pretty lucky. One of the engineers who designed his cellphone included over-voltage protection in the circuit. Of course you probably wouldn’t know about this if there wasn’t a service schematic available. But a bit of searching around let him resurrect the fried USB segment of his Nokia N900.

Now [Script] has been experimenting with portable solar power like the system featured at 25C3 a few years back. Unfortunately he made an error which routed 12V into the USB connector’s 5V rail. After this unfortunate mistake the phone would not longer connect via USB, or charge the battery. Luickly the N900 is a favorite with the hacker community (you can see all kinds of N900 related projects here at Hackaday) and [Script] found his way to their N900 Schematic page. Digging into page four he found part F5300 which is labeled 2.0A. He removed the PCB and shielding, and tested the part with a multimeter to confirm it was blown. A quick wire bridge got the phone charging again, but [Script] plans to position a new fuse as soon as he can source the part.

Who says these devices aren’t user serviceable? If we could just get our hands on more service schematics perhaps our gear would last longer.

Minestation – An External Weather Display For Your Minecraft World

March 1, 2012 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

minestation

If you’re a big Minecraft fan, the folks at [radikaldesign] have something that might be of interest to you. (Translation) Inspired by some of their Minecraft-loving friends, they have developed Minestation – a weather station for your Minecraft game.

The concept is simple. Here in the real world we have the ability to look out the window and see what it is like outside, but many of us turn to digital weather stations, the Weather Channel, or the local news to get the real scoop. They decided that the world of Minecraft should be no different, so they constructed an Arduino shield that allows players to see weather conditions as they play.

The shield contains a Nokia 6100 LCD screen which displays all sorts of useful information. It features a clock and calendar that reflect in-game time, making it easy to know when night is going to fall. It also continually displays the player’s coordinates as well as what the weather looks like in that region. Having this information at hand when you’ve been slogging away in the mines (losing track of time and weather) seems like it could be pretty useful at times.

You can buy one of the devices at Minestation.me, but the design is completely open, so you can easily construct one of your own without too much hassle.

Continue reading to see a video of the Minestation in action.

[Via HackedGadgets]

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Wardriving For Zigbee

February 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Wardriving started out as a search for unprotected WiFi access points before hot spots were prevalent. And so this ZigBee protocol wardriving hardware which [Travis Goodspeed] put together really gives us a sense of nostalgia for that time. Don’t get us wrong, we love our pervasive WiFi access and don’t wish to go back to simpler times. But if the radio signals your looking for are scarce, locating them provides a challenge.

Regular readers will recognize that [Travis] is interested in all things RF. One of his projects included sniffing wireless keyboard packets out of thin air and displaying them on the screen of his Nokia N900. This is right along those lines but he’s upgraded to an N9 phone for the display hardware. He switched up the RF hardware, using a TelosB (a board he’s already familiar with) to get on the 802.15.4 ZigBee spectrum. This dev board has an expansion port which let him use an RN42 module for wireless communications with the phone. This means the sniffing hardware can be hidden away in a backpack or jacket. After all, nobody will question someone walking around staring at a smart phone.

Build Your Own 4-channel Logic Analyzer

February 7, 2012 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

If you’re just getting into hobby electronics chances are there are lots of tools you’d like to get you hands on but can’t yet justify the purchases. Why not build some of the simpler ones? Here’s a great example of a 4-channel logic analyzer that can be your next project and will add to your arsenal for future endeavors.

As you can see, [Vassilis’] creation uses a cellphone-sized LCD screen as the output. It is powered by four rechargeable batteries and driven by an ATmega8 microcontroller. He’s designed the tool without power regulation, relying on the ATmega’s rather wide range of operating voltages, and a few diodes to step down that voltage for the LCD screen.

As you can see in the clip after the break, alligator leads can be used to connect the test circuit to the inputs (don’t forget the ground reference!). Thee buttons at the bottom let you navigate the captured data by panning and zooming. Perhaps the best design feature is the single-sided circuit board which should be quite easy to reproduce at home.

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Nokia N900 Control Pad Is Perfect For Gaming On The Go

December 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 16 Comments

nokia-n900-gamepad

[Andrzej] loves his Nokia N900, noting that it makes a great portable gaming device. Since it supports a wide array of emulators, it’s perfect for indulging his gaming nostalgia on the go. He says that the one downside to the N900 is that its keyboard doesn’t make gaming easy, nor comfortable.

To make gaming a big more fun, he built himself an add-on gamepad that fits perfectly over the phone’s keyboard. Connected via the phone’s USB port, it features 8 push buttons along with a PSP joystick. He used an ATmega8A as the brains of the controller, communicating with the phone as a USB keyboard. He says that this sort of configuration makes it extremely easy to do all sorts of custom button mapping on a per-game basis.

As you can see in the picture above the controller is currently lacking a case, but we think that with a bit of clever packaging, it could look as nice as a retail add-on.

Check out the short video below to see his gamepad in action.

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