It took a while since I first posted about the new ATmega header board but finally, here it is.
The board is great for prototyping on a solderless breadboard. It is compatible with the common 28-pin AVR controllers like ATmega48, ATmega88, ATmega168 and ATmega328. On plus it is Arduino compatible.
Some of the features:
Space efficient, occupies only on more row than the controller itself
Has no voltage regulator on board, so you choose, at which voltage you want to run it
It has SMD resistors and LEDs (size 1206) to make it a great starting point to learn how to hand solder SMD
Has a sticker to tell which pin is what. Thanks Tod!
What is a remote accelerometer? It’s a tiny device that has a three axis accelerometer and transmit the acceleration values to a remote host. And what is it good for? There are various uses for it. One is you attach the sensor to someone and let him jump around. On your remote machine you can use the data to produce sound or modify music. Think of it as a simplified Wiimote.
If you’ve missed Marcus post, here is another on the same topic.
Nearly every other Thursday Marcus and I are hanging out together for having a beer and chatting about all things geek, especially electronics, CNC, 3D-printing, micrcontroller and Arduino. But there’s no limit, everyone interested in tinkering and making is welcome. It takes place at Saal II in Schanze. Try us, we’re kind
You can take a look at Marcus’ or mine twitterfeed to checkout when the next #palo_altona will be.
We already had guests sometimes but yesterday’s drinkup was great as we had two new guests. Feels as if there is something moving in Hamburg. Yeah!
Update 2010/02/16: Palo Altona is now scheduled biweekly. Every Thursday was a bit stressing for everybody.
A couple of weeks ago Jan came to me and asked me if I could build a special kind of twitter wall. At our company CoreMedia we do an Open Space every 3 months or so. This time we had a Hacking Day as well, so we needed something special. After throwing some ideas around, we came up with a twitter client that should print out tweets with an electric typewriter. A short google showed, that that has been done already (of course!). See it at oomlout.
But that couldn’t stop us. Jan scanned ebay for a nice electric typewriter and found a Commodore SQ 1000. It was in really good condition, probably rarely used. It worked as advertised.
For my latest projects I used a lot of single cell lipo batteries. They are really nice. High power density, low self-discharge, no memory effect and they can deliver quite an amount of current.
But lipo battery handling is a bit more complicated as with other rechargeable batteries. You have to take care of under voltage and over charging as that may destroy the battery.
I used the Sparkfun LiPoly charger, based on MAX1555, for some time and it works really well. The only thing I missed was a way to control the current. After some research I decided to try another chip, the Microchip MCP73833.
Again a Braitenberg vehicle. This one is even smaller, than the previous one and comes on a custom PCB. It weighs 17 gramms, is driven by two pager motors, powered by a small lipo cell and controlled by an 8-pin ATtiny25V.
Here is my very first article. It is published in c’t, one of the best known computer magazines in Germany. wOOt!
It shows some basic Arduino examples and how to build a Wiimote-like controller. The controller consists of an 3-axis accelerometer, a push button and an Arduino nano on a breadboard. This combination is used to control a Lunar Lander type of game, programmed in Processing.
