Posted October 8, 2012 by Chris

“ For our final project, we used an Atmel AT90S8535 microprocessor to create a hangman game. The letters are displayed on a 16-character LCD, and are input using a 16-button keypad. The 8 LED’s on the Atmel development board are used as our “hanging man” – one lights up for each wrong guess. We also attached a speaker to our game which adds sounds to our game.”

Posted October 2, 2012 by Chris

“Project Holodeck is a virtual reality platform built with consumer facing technology, DIY off-the-shelf components, cutting-edge custom software, and creatively integrated peripherals. The goal of Project Holodeck is to bring 360-degree 6-DOF full-body virtual reality out of the research lab and into a fun, accessible consumer gaming platform.”

Posted September 20, 2012 by Chris

“In this article we’ll explore how to output VGA signals from an Arduino UNO by using the timer interrupt to keep output in sync with the exact timing required by the VGA protocol. The end result will be a very empty ‘main’ loop in our software and a lot of interrupt code that handles everything else. The Arduino is only running at 16 MHz so doing VGA with interrupts on it is really pushing the limits!”

Posted September 19, 2012 by Chris

“With the relative complexity of today’s electronics, it’s not feasible to start from scratch; you need good building blocks to implement your vision. You’ll want to use commercial off- the-shelf components as much as possible and you most likely don’t want to be bound to a bulky PC…So how do we get started prototyping our ideas with the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet? For electronics concepts: enter Arduino.”

Posted September 10, 2012 by Chris

“Although the virtual DIY Calculator is lots of fun, there is something satisfying about having a real machine to play with, so we’ve been pondering the idea of creating a physical version of the DIY Calculator…”

Posted September 7, 2012 by Chris

“Easy build and use, the general purpose Big LED with SPI serial interfacing. Expandable for multiple digits but still uses only three wires for receiving data from any uC boards.”

Posted July 30, 2012 by Chris

“The LEDactus is my version of a dry climate niche dweller like a cactus. LEDactus is immobile and attempts to survive by creating a pleasant display. This is of course in the hopes that passersby will be so entranced that they will build the LEDactus’ progeny.”

Posted July 14, 2012 by Chris

“There are 3 different types of the Shift Register Breakout Board, basically this breakout board is just that, it allows you to use less of your breadboard plus it’s easier to hook up to as well.”

Posted July 12, 2012 by Chris

“As a first project for this new toy, I decided to make an LCD controller. This seemed like an excellent first project because it could enable people at my local hackerspace to make use of some of our most expensive – and most useless, until now – electronic junk: LCD screens.”

Posted July 6, 2012 by Chris

“This project, called ‘Mini-Flash’, is a programmable LED Sequencer/Flasher that is based around the PICAXE 08M microcontroller. It is basically a spin-off of the Pro-Flash Programmable LED Flasher/Sequencer which is based around the larger Picaxe 18X microcontroller.”