Posted July 22, 2012 by Chris

“It’s been too much time without writing here and I have many ideas but little time to get them built and documented. This time I’ll do a typical programming exercise, the ‘Game of Life’ by John Horton Conway.”

Posted July 5, 2012 by Chris

“Here is an electronic dice kit based on an Atmel ATtiny13. I love the Tiny13 and one of my first projects was a digital dice. Nothing new, right? But have you seen 2 dice generated on just 5 I/O pins of a microcontroller? I hadn’t. But I knew it could be done and this is proof!”

Posted June 27, 2012 by Chris

“When I originally wanted to start playing with the N64 controller protocol I used the only PIC I had on hand which was a 16f628a. Despite being my first real microcontroller project and killing many PICs I managed to create a functioning controller.”

Posted May 20, 2012 by Chris

“Using an FPGA to replicate no longer available components on the Sound and CPU Boards in a WPC-DCS Pinball Machine.
These include the two ASICs and PAL.”

Posted May 2, 2012 by Chris

“Our project derives ideas from the classic breakout game. In the game, there is a layer of bricks located on the top of the screen, a moveable paddle on the bottom, and a ball travelling across the screen. The objective of the game is to use the paddle to bounce the ball back up every time it falls down so that eventually the ball will break all the bricks. In our version, however, the game can be controlled with hand motions.”

Posted April 11, 2012 by Chris

“The purpose of the Hackvision is to allow the user to create retro-style arcade games and so on that can be played on a monitor or television set with analogue video input. Although the display resolution is only 128 by 96 pixels, this is enough to get some interesting action happening. Frankly I didn’t think the Arduino hardware environment alone was capable of this, so the Hackvision was a pleasant surprise.”

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.”