Sink Your Teeth Into PiPhone

April 26, 2014 by Kristina Panos 37 Comments

Raspberry Pi cell phone Have you ever dreamed of independence from smartphone bloatware? If you have a Raspberry Pi and an Adafruit TFT, you’re halfway to making your own version of [Dave]’s PiPhone.

This tasty proof-of-concept cellular sandwich is made by adding a Sim900 GSM/GPRS module, which communicates via UART, to the Pi/TFT hardware while using a piece of foam core board in the middle to prevent shorts. You won’t get free service or anything, but you can pop a pre-paid SIM card into it. He’s powering it with a LiPo battery and using a DC-to-DC converter to set up the 3.7V to 5V. You could do a lot worse than the $158 BOM, and we’re betting you have a Pi lying around already. We wish more phones had baby rocker switches.

There’s a slight problem with the PiPhone: it gets pretty warm and there isn’t a lot of room for air circulation. For best results, let it cool on a well-attended windowsill or operate it near a fan like [Dave] did. He doesn’t have the code up on GitHub as of this writing, but he will capitulate to high demand. Make the jump to see [Dave]’s tour of the PiPhone and watch him make a call with it.

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Generating Embroidery With An Arduino

February 15, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 8 Comments

Want a nifty way to combine the craft of embroidery with electronics? The folks working on the open source Embroidermodder demoed their software by generating an embroidery of the KDE logo using a TFT screen and an Arduino.

Embroidermodder is an open source tool for generating embroidery patterns. It generates a pattern and a preview rendering of what the embroidery will look like when complete. It’s a cross-platform desktop application with a GUI, but the libembroidery library does the hard work in the background. This library was ported to Arduino to pull off the hack.

While generating pictures of embroidery with an Arduino might look neat, it isn’t too useful. However, since the library has been ported it is possible to use it to control other hardware. With the right hardware, this could be the beginning of an open source embroidery machine.

After the break, check out a video of the pattern being generated.

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Easy LCD Control For Arduino Mega

July 24, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

arduino-mega-easy-lcd-adapter

[Andy Brown] wrote in to show off the TFT LCD adapter he’s been working on for connecting inexpensive displays to an Arduino Mega.

These TFT LCD screens can be picked up on eBay for a few dollars. But they’re more suited for 16-bit microcontrollers which operate at 3.3V levels. His adapter board, which plugs directly into the Mega’s dual-row pin header, makes it easier to control these with an 8-bit chip that is running at 5V.

There’s a couple of things that make this happen. First off, he’s included level converter chips to managed the 3.3V/5V issues. Second, he uses latch chips to translate eight pins on the Arduino Mega to sixteen pins on the display. Those chips have a latch pin which holds the output values in memory while the input pins are changed. He manages to drive the latch on just one of the chips using the chip select (CS) line called for by the LCD protocol. This means you don’t lose any extra pins.

Another way to uses the displays with Arduino is to use a smart controller for TFT screens.

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Arduino Cellphone

July 20, 2013 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

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The fact that you can build a cellphone around an Arduino is pretty neat. But we’re drawn to this project more as a testament to the advancement of hobby electronics. An [Average Joe] can build this thing with a minimum or background knowledge and without breaking the bank. Wow.

Of course this isn’t the first DIY cellphone we’ve come across. One of our favorites is this one which resides on a home etched PCB. There was even another Arduino offering with similar components back in September. But the one seen above really pulls it all together into a package that is usable for everyday life. The components include and Arduino Uno, GPRS shield from Seeed Studios, a TFT touch screen, Lithium battery and charging circuit, and a few other bobbles. All of it is mounted inside of a 3D printed case.

A simple phone calls for a simple UI and that’s included as well. The main menu has two buttons, one for placing a call, the other for sending a text. From there you get the virtual keypad seen above for typing out the phone number or composing a message.

[Thanks Victorzie]

Bluetooth Network Monitor

January 11, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 20 Comments

[Zak] wanted to keep tabs on his network connection without needing to log into his router. Since his router was a PC running Debian Linux, he rigged up a Bluetooth Network Monitor to display the information.

The monitor is based on a ATMega328P that reads data from a Bluetooth serial connection and displays it on the TFT screen. It uses a low cost Bluetooth module to receive data from a router. A shell script fetches the data and formats it into a string that can be sent over the Bluetooth link.

A USB connection with a desktop computer is used to power the device, but [Zak] also added USB support using V-USB. He plans to use it to get data from the desktop. For example, he could display CPU load and temperature data.

Overall, this is a nice project for fetching data wirelessly and displaying it on your desk. [Zak] has provided the code and Eagle files with his write up for anyone interested in building their own.

Developing With EBay-sourced ARM + LCD Dev Boards

November 7, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

eBay isn’t only about counterfeit designer handbags and boxes of all-marshmallow Lucky Charms, sometimes there’s actually something useful for sale. [Matt] found a bunch of Chinese-made ARM development boards with integrated LCD displays on the ‘bay, but without a reliable toolchain, these boards – as cool as they are – are nearly useless. Thankfully, he figured out how to do something with these boards, and neatly packaged everything into a VirtualBox image.

The boards in question usually include a 2.4″ or 3.2″ touch panel LCD, an STM32F103 ARM Cortex-M3 CPU, a microSD card connector, and sometimes a few other goodies like 16MB of Flash memory and an RS-232 port. An amazing amount of computational capability packaged into an easy-to-use form factor made even more awesome by their $40 price point.

Because these boards offer so much more than a common Arduino, a proper OS is in order. [Matt] looked over FreeRTOS and included a few demo programs for his Ubuntu-based VirtualBox image ~~(available for download on [Matt]’s site, it’s a dropbox, email us if you need some hosting, [Matt])~~ Never mind, see below.

Programming these boards can be done over a serial interface, but a JTAG programmer such as a Bus Blaster makes things very, very easy.

You can check out a few demos [Matt] put together after the break. It’s a very cool development that is much more suited for being integrated into an electronics project than a Raspberry Pi or other such high-power ARM board, and something we hope to see more of in the future.

EDIT: You know what’s really good for hosting Linux distros? Torrents. That’s [Matt]’s distro and the HaD crew is seeding. Please seed.

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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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