The idea of an annoying beep device it’s pretty original and I’m sure it works on everyone. So here is how it works, the thing is damn small because it only contains the ATTiny2313, a piezzo speaker a resistor and a capacitor, thus beeing easy to hide; you carefully hide the device into a friends house. The device will start emitting a beep sound at random intervals of time. The time between beeps is anywhere within half an hour to nine hours.
Your friend will start looking for the source of the beep among his gadgets like mobile phones, tv, etc, not knowing that the beep is coming from the prank device. Just imagine yourself into this situation, it will drive you nuts :). And there’s another feature of the device, the small battery will last forever because the device only draws 200uA.
The author made the project for a friend who wanted to include it into an amplifier as an extra function. The project turned out really well and it works flawless. It’s based on the ATmega8 and it uses a 4 digit 7 segments common anodes led display to show the time. The code is pretty simple, written in C, but it lacks comments as the author did not felt the need to add them.
The controller is actually just an ATTiny2313, running of it’s internal RC oscillator at 8MHz, soldered onto an universal board with a few resistors and wires. There are no control items - no buttons, no nothing. It just does what it does - makes the effect of LEDs randomly fading in and out using 9 channels of PWM. Unfortunately, the processor has only a few hardware PWM channels, so some of the channels had to be done by software.
Before starting this Ethernet project the author did of course some prototyping and then he noticed alreadythat UDP was not a problem with lots of space left on the atmega88. Therefore he was quite confident that TCP + HTTP will work. TCP/IP was invented more than 25 years ago. Todays microcontrollers provide almost the computing power a standard computer had at that time. No java or xml was used at that time. Things were done in smart and efficient ways.
As you can imagine this web-server code is written for a friendly environment. Don’t put it on the open internet. The code uses e.g the incoming packet to build from it the outgoing packet. An attacker who sends a mal formed IP packet might be able to confuse the TCP/IP stack. The code is verified with a lot of different browsers and a number of operating systems. It was tested Linux, BSD Unix, Win 98, Win XP, Mac OS-X with a number of different web browsers. It works very well but it was not tested agains atacks and destroy tests.
What is Ginger ? Ginger is yet another physical computing platform, which is similar to gainer (http://gainer.cc). The goal of project is to develop PC Platform
Ginger makes use of avr-usb (http://www.obdev.at/avrusb/) for the implementation of USB interface. Thanks to avr-usb, no external USB-serial bridge chip is required to interface host PC, and this makes ginger hardware simple. ATmega88 is chosen because it is available in AKIZUKI-denshi, where many electric parts are sold in bargain price.(We love the store).
In Macintosh platforms, you don’t need to install software drivers, as the device is recognized as /dev/cu.usbmodem*. In Windows, please use ginger.inf provided with source code in tarball.
