Here’s 2 ATMega168’s sharing one 16mHz resonator, one reset switch, two 10k resistors, one 220ohm resistor, and two LED pilots. I used a mini USB adapter and uploaded the LED blink test to both chips, and as Paul [Badger] suspected, they are perfectly synchronized - I’ve tested numerous resets, and the start up blink sequence and blink demo on both, are identical.
I don’t need synchronized chips, but I happen to have a use for 2 168’s connected via i2C - not sure if anyone else does but it adds a lot of pins and a second serial buffer for an almost next to nothing outlay. This can be put together using 1 RBBB and a second chip with the boot loader installed, so that’s quite inexpensive, so long as you’ve got got a mini USB adapter laying around.
Ladyada released this great tutorial on how to connect a parallel LCD to an Arduino. I’m sure this will prove useful to many people, because more and more projects are LCD based, and until now there wasn’t any good tutorial out there on hooking up an LCD. I don’t know if you noticed too, but simple LED projects are not surviving these days, people like LCD’s and interacting with them.
This project consist of an 8×8 LED grid controlled by the Arduino. The result is a particle effect, a particle that bounces around the LED matrix. But the arduino only has 13 outputs, so you can only control 13 LEDs? Well, the author discovered that trough Charlieplexing which is a complicated mode of wiring LED’s you can actually drive more LED’s with fewer outputs.
While this project doesn’t directly take advantage of ambient technology, it does show you a great method for generating a simple color-changing LED that can be integrated into any number of projects. By combining the open-source Arduino microcontroller circuit board with a “smart” LED called BlinkM, you can build a simple mood cube that randomly generates a spectrum of sumptuous colors.
Want your Arduino to check email? How about sending a twitter (which can then be easily forwarded to a phone via SMS)? Or grabbing data from a website? There are so many possibilites for projects that connect to the Internet to get data, now there’s an easy way to do it with an Arduino.
This shield allows you to add and use an XPort or XPort direct(+) Ethernet module (they cost only US$30-$50) using any 4 pins. All of the TCP/IP stack awfulness is done for you in the module so its super easy to just connect to any server.
