Monthly Archives: December 2010


Power usage monitor using Atmel AVR

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This project uses Atmega168 microcontroller to compute the power usage at home and logs it to an SD card. It has a graphical LCD display too that shows the power usage as a strip chart. Besides, the voltage and current waveforms can also be displayed on the LCD. The current is measured using a pair of current transformers whereas the voltage is measured using a 2000:1 voltage divider network. An LMC6484AIN quad op-amp and an AD623AN instrumentation amplifier are also used for signal amplification from the current sensor and the voltage divider.

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Running message display project for Christmas

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Introduction As Christmas is coming people have already lightened their houses. I thought of doing something different for this Christmas besides the festive Christmas lights. I made a running message display using LEDs, and thought of sharing it with you. This is a very simple running message display project that displays the message ‘MERRY XMAS’, where each letter is created with 5mm diameter red-color LEDs. The 9 letters in the message are individually turned on or off through a PIC16F688 microcontroller’s I/O pins. Therefore, a variety of display patterns can be generated through the software inside the microcontroller.

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Monochrome Composite Video using Atmega8

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This article describes the design of a Text on TV project. It takes serial data and displays text on a TV screen. The hardware part of this project is pretty simple. It uses an Atmega8 microcontroller that runs with a 16 MHz crystal. The article provides the details on PAL and NTSC timing signals, as well as how to implement the signals in software.

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Breadboard module for PIC16F628A

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Here’s another breadboard module that carries a PIC16F628A microcontroller. The power supply pins and the I/O ports of the PIC16F628A microcontroller are accessed through male headers. It can be easily plugged into a breadboard and is very useful for quick prototyping. It frees up a lot of space on the breadboard since the oscillator, reset, and ICSP circuits are already built on the module. It is different from the previous PIC16F688 breadboard module in the way that the microcontroller now runs with an external 4.0 MHz crystal. So, this module will be more appropriate for experiments that require accurate timing

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Cellphone controlled robot vehicle

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When we talk about wireless robot vehicles, we usually think about the RF circuits. But this project is different. It uses a mobile phone to control the motion of a robotic vehicle, and therefore, the range of operation is as large as the coverage area of the service provider.

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