The handy Butterfly GPS is a cost-effective system that presents location, date, and time data on its LCD. The system features an ATmega169 and a highly sensitive GPS receiver engine board based on the SiRF chipset. Its amazing what you can do with such a low cost development board.
AVR Butterfly GPS System: [Download Project] - [View Project PDF] - [Via]
With this ATmega32 based system, you can monitor a Fiat’s engine control unit (ECU) as you drive. You can display up to four of the available ECU parameters and have the values updated in real-time as you drive. It also decodes the internal ECU error codes as they occur and displays them in real time. An ECU is the Electronics Control Unit of a car that controls various things like the ignition time and valve timing.
Fiat ECU Monitor System: [Download Project] - [View Project PDF] - [Via]
Parallel interfacing LCD with MCU needs at least 6 I/O pins (4 bit mode) and maximun 11 I/O pins (8 bit mode). The I/O pin’s can be cut down to 3 pin by serial interfacing using shift registers. There are a few shift registers that can be used such as 74HC164, 74HC595, CD4094 and other compatible 8 bit shift register. Before you attempt to do serial interfacing, it helps to get familiar with parallel interfacing, you can find many reference from internet.
Serial interfacing LCD with PIC Microcontroller: [Link] - [Via]
This is one of the most accurate and simplest LC inductance / capacitance Meters that one can find, yet one that you can easily build yourself. This LC Meter allows to measure incredibly small inductances starting from 10nH to 1000nH, 1uH to 1000uH, 1mH to 100mH and capacitance from 0.1pF up to 900nF. LC Meter’s circuit uses an auto ranging system so that way you do not need to spend time selecting ranges manually. Another neat function is the “Zero Out” switch that will reset the initial inductance / capacitance, making sure that the final readings of the LC Meter are as accurate as possible.
LC Meter based on PIC16F84A: [Link]
LCD2USB is a open source/open hardware project. The goal of LCD2USB is to connect HD44780 based text LCD displays to various PCs via USB. LCD2USB was meant to be cheap and to be made of easily available parts. It is therefore based on the Atmel AVR Mega8 CPU and does not require any difficult to obtain parts like separate USB controllers and the like. The total cost (without display and pcb) are about 5 to 10 Euros. LCD2USB currently comes with a simple demo application that works under Linux, MacOS X and Windows.
HD44780 LCD Connected To USB: [Link]
