If you are looking to get your feet wet with PIC microcontroller USB functionality, this article by Sylvain Ferrand is a great place to start. To keep on top of developments in this area I would suggest subscribing to this magazine, what will it cost you? Nothing, it’s free! “PIC 18F4550 and 18F2550 are powerful microcontrollers including a full-speed USB V2.0 compliant interface . With these MCU it’s very easy
The Soap mouse looks very interesting. I wonder how long before it is a commercial product? “Soap is a pointing device based on hardware found in a mouse, yet works in mid-air. Soap consists of an optical sensor device moving freely inside a hull made of fabric. As the user applies pressure from the outside, the optical sensor moves independent from the hull. The optical sensor perceives this relative
Here is a simple circuit to make some dancing LED lights. “Here is a simple circuit which can be used for decoration purposes or as an indicator. Flashing or dancing speed of LEDs can be adjusted and various dancing patterns of lights can be formed. The circuit consists of two astable multivibrators. One multivibrator is formed by transistors T1 and T2 while the other astable multivibrator is formed by T3
Trimbitas Sorin has created a simple POV (Persistence of vision) kit using AVR microcontroller. If you want to build your own there is code and a schematic available on his site. “This is my first serious(the first one was a one LED blinker) AVR project 🙂 I searched the Internet for a cool looking and easy to build project with ATTiny2313 and I end up on this page,it was
Using a PIC16F877A microcontroller and some high current electronics a grid of windows was turned into a huge LED display. Seems like students at MIT have lots of tech fun! “The Simmons LED Display is a home-made two-story high 6×6 array of windows outfitted with ultra-cool Luxeon LXHL-LR3C Royal Blue LEDs. It is located in the exercise room of the architecturally infamous Simmons Hall, a residence hall designed by
Chris Rybitski has made a creative LED tree using some new parts and some well placed recycled items. “All of the LEDs have a common ground (the 14 bare copper wires that are all soldered together to form a bouquet of wires). An insulated wire is then solderet to the anode of the leds and wrapped around the bare copper wire. Parts: * 14 ultrabright blue LED’s * xbox 360
This project uses a Dallas iButton to operate an electronic lock. Have a look at the full article for lots of detail and project source code to build your own. "This electronic lock can be used with any type of iButtons you may already have, since the only thing needed is the internal serial number, that’s different for every iButton. The command used to read the serial number is the
