Posted April 9, 2012 by Chris

“This article is about a Tetris game I created with an AtMega32 controlling the beam of an oscilloscope, which I very creatively named Scopetris.”

Posted March 29, 2012 by Chris

“The Uzebox design guidelines were simple: keep complexity and parts count low, yet don’t cut on quality. And the ATMega644 greatly helped me to accomplish this. They have so much integrated peripherals and functions (like SPI, UARTS, counters, analog comparator, pull-ups, etc); it was ‘almost’ too easy to attain that goal. Let’s a have look at the big picture and then I’ll describe the global flow and what each block does.”

Posted March 20, 2012 by Chris

“For our project, we wanted to push the video sampling and processing capabilities of the ATmega644 8-bit microcontroller. Using a high-speed analog-to-digital converter as an input device, we were able to sample a reasonably high-resolution grayscale image from a color camera’s video output. Using this grayscale image, we are able to track objects and recognize shapes that stood out from the background by a customizable threshold.”

Posted February 11, 2012 by Chris

“The console is designed as platform for learning digital electronics and C#: we’re in the process of writing a book covering all aspects of building the console, how its components work and how to write games for it with our framework.”

Posted January 30, 2012 by Chris

“Cade9 is my small embedded project consisting of ATmega32 MCU with custom hardware which I hand soldered on a matrix board. This was my undergraduate 3rd year minor project. It uses the open source cocoOS as scheduler. On top of CADE9 one can implement classic arcade games like snakes, pong, bricks, breakout etc.”

Posted January 28, 2012 by Chris

“The Stelladaptor seems to be a solid product but I think that the price per unit, at $29.95, is a bit too high for a single-joystick adapter. That’s why I started thinking about building an adapter myself so I would be able to play emulated games (and others too) with these sticks.”

Posted January 20, 2012 by Chris

“My goal was to implement an older embedded system entirely in VHDL. I chose the NES due to its complexity and variety of subsystems. The idea is to prove that chips can be modeled in VHDL and synthesized on an FPGA to replace either single ICs in old systems or the systems themselves.”

Posted January 3, 2012 by Chris

“The final Micro-controller I decided to use on the final product was a ATMEGA8. In the first post I used an ATMEGA8515. For several reasons I decided not to use this one in the final product. Firstly, it’s a 40 pin package. I do not need that many I/O lines. It draws more power. And finally, I need that one for my studies at uni. So an ATMEGA8 was used.”

Posted December 19, 2011 by Chris

“For my MCU Project Laboratory final project, I created a two-player Pong game on an analog o-scope. Two potentiometer knobs functioned as the controllers and A/D converters translated the voltage set by the controllers into coordinate information for the paddles. The XY mode of o-scope enabled two voltage inputs to direct the CRT’s electron gun around the display to generate 2D graphics.”

Posted December 7, 2011 by Chris

“For those who don’t know what a Magic 8 Thing is, it is a Magic 8 Ball, made with an ATMega328, an LCD, a surplus mercury tilt switch from a retired thermostat and some code. I call it a ‘Thing’ instead of a ‘Ball’ because my version is both non-spherical and bears no functional resemblance to an actual ‘Magic 8 Ball’.”