YourITronics

Here is what the author is saying about Etherrape:

With this project, we’ll be creating hard- and software for enabling ethernet on an Atmel microcontroller. fd0 first built a prototype of it on lochraster and then made a fully-featured PCB afterwards, which will be sold as a construction set later on. Everyone with moderate soldering skills will be able to build this device. Only two SMD-devices are used (One is optional - And yes, that’s a feature!).

At first we only had the design-target to create an ethernet-enabled microcontroller platform. But then we thought of all the great things that could be done with such a device and therefore added a lot of different interfaces and hardware. Today, the following features are either built-in or easily available:

• Ethernet and TCP/IP
• Simple webserver
• Linux command line tool
• RS232
• RS485/422 (half- /fullduplex)
• Dalls 1wire bus
• Infrared Receiver and Transmitter for RC5 Codec, firmware extension necessary for other codecs
• MCA-25 Handy-Camera with VGA resolution can be attached (approx 10 Euro on ebay), not yet supported by firmware
• 2MB Data-Flash memory
• I2C
• SPI

Extensions:
ELV (www.elv.de) and Conrad (www.conrad.de) offer RF-Controlled devices like powerswitches, dimmers, movement detectors, temperature-sensors and many more. All these devices belong to the FS20 series, which ensures ineropability. By attaching RF Modules to the etherrape (sender and/or receiver module), it becomes a fully fledged member of the FS20-system an can control all devices.
Housing:
We offer a housing with a fully prepared front panel (see pictures below).
The housing offers space for an additional 80×100mm PCB to accomodate your selfmade extensions.

[VIA]

Remember the article on Tv-B-Gone kit ? Yes it was a nice project that you can play with, but here come big-brother with its learning function. It means you can now teach the kit to turn off every TV imaginable. The current hardware  includes an Atmega 168, a USB port, a 2MB Atmel dataflash (for storing all sorts of codes), a learning mechanism (which can detect the correct carrier frequency), four buttons (selecting transmitter and learning mode, enable USB, …) and of course four powerful infrared LEDs.

You can find info, full source code and schematics on the authors page [Link]

 The AT90S8515 microcontroller-based Microstepper Motor Controller can handle four-wire bipolar stepper motors with up to 1-A phase currents and 30-V power supplies. This project achieves 256 microsteps per step, which is approximately 50,000 steps per revolution.

[VIA] 

The powerful AT90S2313 microcontroller-based Magnetic Stripe Card Reader reads a portion of the data stored in the magnetic stripe of a card, including alphanumeric data (i.e., the cardholder’s account number), the cardholder’s name, expiration date, LRC, and other discretionary data such as verification values and validation codes

[VIA] - [Project]

Michael Sung writes:

The SAK2 (Swiss-Army-Knife 2) Board, is a very flexible data acquisition board that serves as the central sensor hub for the MIThril 2003 distributed system architecture. The SAK2 board was designed primarily to interface a variety of sensing technologies with mobile device-based wearable platforms to enable real-time context-aware, streaming data applications. The SAK2 is an extremely flexible data acquisition hub, allowing for a wide variety of custom as well as third-party sensors to interface to it. In addition to being a sensor hub, the SAK2 can also operate in stand-alone mode for a variety of long-term data acquisition and real-time interactive applications.

The SAK2 was designed and intended for general use by research groups at the MIT Media Laboratory as well as other research communities at large. The following links provide all the design files necessary to replicate the MIT Wearables Group’s hardware setup. On the hardware side, we recommend the MPLAB 6.5 microcontroller development environment, the CCS compiler, and the PICStart Plus programmer. We support a variety of linux-based tools called Enchantment to stream data in real-time from the SAK2 hub through the 803.11b infrastructure (via the Zaurus or other linux-based device). We are currently working on a much cleaner, modular, and buffered version of the SAK2 firmware which should be available in May, 2004.

Michael Sung