Tag: ATmega64

Simply good Atmega64 development board

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Before Arduino appeared, embedded hobbyists were more attracted to building their own development boards. If someone needed new feature they simply included in their design. We don’t say that Arduino like approach is bad, but it feels that sometimes it makes us lazy on hardware. There is not much creativity by simply grabbing Arduino, dropping couple libraries out of pool and writing couple lines of compact code. Anyway, if you like to do more barebone developing, Radek suggests his Atmega64 development board which can serve as great prototyping board. It features many useful functionality like DS3231 RTC, DS1820 1-Wire temperature sensor, 24AA00SN I2C EEPROM, FT232RL for USB connectivity, 16×2 LCD, couple of seven segment LED displays, eight buttons and 16 LEDs. This is great board for learning AVR C programming but also can be used as base platform for many great projects. And if you still want it to be Arduino, then there is no problem to find suitable bootloader for it. Board’s Eagle CAD files are available if you would like to build on for yourself. Continue reading

The Hell’s Displayer!

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Can you ever imagine building a large propeller clock with a rotor diameter of 2 meters? Yep, it’s totally out of your mind, as it’s quite a huge and hard task indeed… However, if you still have the determination to go through this project, then you should pay attention and read all the important things about this Hell’s displayer! For your information, this hell’s displayer is actually a big propeller clock with 100 of blue SMD LEDs on the propeller and all through a shift register. It’s fully controlled by an ATmega64. When the propeller starts to rotate, different patterns, logos or images will be shown on the propeller. The mechanics weighs about 20 kilograms and it’s almost entirely made of aluminium. The power of the rotor electronics is via a slip ring. The maximum power consumption of electronics is 2A, when all the 100 LED lights up at once! In order to reduce the air resistance, the 2m-long piece of aluminium was flat at the edges. At 600 revolutions per minute, the rotor can be rotated up to 226Km/h!… Continue reading

It’s a LED Pharmacy Cross, Not a Holy Cross!

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Nowadays, we’re always saw many pharmacies hanging a huge LED pharmacy cross at their pharmacy entrance to let people know there is a pharmacy inside the store. Why they want to use the LED pharmacy cross at the entrance of the pharmacy? The reason is simple, they look cool and catchy, and it also can be seen from distance and they can be customized according to your own needs! So, if you decided to develop an LED pharmacy cross, then you’ve came to the right place. For your information, those LED pharmacy crosses that selling on the marketplace is quite expensive and have very limited functions as well. As a result, it’s better to build one for your own use and you can easily customize it whenever you want! Basically, this project will need the ULN2003 Darlington arrays and the circuit was designed to receive messages through serial interface, where the sources are coning from a computer and than display them. Furthermore, a serial interface by wire is to be used to transmit data between the terminal and the ATmega64.… Continue reading