320×240 LCD with resistive touch screen, USB, SD card, 3d engine, USB, movie playback, UI interface, sprite engine , would you believe all of this is handled by an AVR 8 bit device with 4K RAM running at just 12 MHz ? You’d better believe it because it’s real. Well the ATmega644 runs at only 12 MHz because it’s powered at 3.3 V so as you can imagine it’s stretched to it’s limit. The LCD with the integrated controller helps allot taking the job from the microcontroller.
The Pacman demo just fits in 8K flash and 512 bytes of RAM. It uses the sprite engine and runs at > 60fps. The images and animations don’t even touch the RAM they go straight from the SD card to the display. It turns out reading a 512 byte block from the SD takes ~1ms.
Source code, demo files, Eagle PCB and schematics are provided at the projects SF page.
I was really interested about it when Seeed Studio first announced the DSO nano on their blog, unfortunately I was not able to get one of the beta’s which they offered in a limited number at a lower price. The specs they released don’t advertise for too much power from this portable but it’s style and the fact that is portable together with the low price tag should compensate for the lack of power. And don’t get me wrong on the power issue, the 1 MHz bandwidth is still enough to cover your hobby needs. For me the only big disadvantage is the fact that it has only one channel, but it compensates with the ability of recording readings that you can later compare with the actual reading.
I would love to give you more details about this portable oscilloscope, but I have to wait until I can get my hands on the DSO nano. I’m currently waiting for Seeed to list it on their product page so i can place an order.
For all tweeter users that possess some hardware hacking skills, this is the Tweeter Wireless Display. It is basically a modified wireless router, stripped of its original case and mounted on a custom made wooden chassis. The text is displayed on a small screen which is mounted on the top side of the chassis.
The router used in this project is the WL-520-GU from Asus, which features a 4-port switch and supports both IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g. The device uses OpenWRT to run a Python script that fetches the 20 most recent tweets. The script is taken from a USB flash memory and the information is displayed on a serial alphanumeric LCD from Sparkfun.
The project is entitled Tweetser, a combination from ‘tweet’ and ‘serial’ and is surely an appealing piece of equipment for any tweeter lover out there, especially for the ones that are also hardware enthusiasts. I personally still think that a PC would be more suitable for this kind of things as it also features… you know, a keyboard and a slightly bigger screen. Nevertheless, it’s still a nifty little project that can be useful if you’re a tweeter maniac.
Also entitled Arduino LCD Backpack ‘Sandwich’ by its illustrious creator, this is a simple do-it-yourself project using an Arduino microcontroller and a small LCD display. The MCU runs at 16Mhz thanks to the ceramic resonator (the light-brown one, located near the microcontroller). The LCD is an alphanumeric one with two lines of 16 characters (the color used is amber/orange, which gives it a nice, old-school feeling). The contrast of the LCD can be adjusted using a potentiometer.
The Backpack has an IR input receiver module connected (the small silver box on the left side) and a 6 pin FTDI style serial header soldered directly to the wires, which is used for software download and also for the 5V DC power supply. The project is free, for non-commercial use only. More details, pictures and source code available in the link below.
There’s nothing like an ice-cold drink on a hot summer day, is there? Especially if you’re a beer-loving dude with some free time and some hardware skills.
A fairly simple and fun project, the “Digital Thermostatic Beer Refreshment Regulator” (as entitled by its author) is based on an Arduino and a temperature sensor that control the temperature of the liquid inside the refrigerator (i.e. beer). The Arduino is actually a Freeduino SB and the temperature sensor is a LM35DZ. The beer regulator also possesses a NTE RS1-1D4-21 solid state relay to trigger 5v voltage to manage the amperage of the refrigerator.
The temperature is displayed on a SLCD162 MeLabs serial LCD Display which only uses 1 pin of the Arduino microcontroller. Other parts include some 10k and 100k resistores, pins, connectors, wires and plex-glass for the LCD stand (you can find a detailed parts list in the link). The code is written in C and it can be easily modified to adjust turning of the whole device ON or OFF to match your desired temperature of the beer. Plans for rewriting some of the code to get a more precise temperature are on the way. Also, a more complex display could be added to the project quite easily, since the current LCD is connected using an ethernet jack with Cat5 cable.
Now, I’m pretty sure you can do all these things with a common refrigerator that has a LCD display on the outside and a front panel to set the temperature, so it’s hardly a world changing project. Further more, you don’t risk getting your fingers burnt with the soldering iron or having your kitchen fill with cold beer (maybe that wouldn’t be such an issue to some, but still). However, if you’re a do-it-yourself kind of guy and want to make your own cold beer apparatus, then you can try this one. Salute!
