Debasish Dutta‘s Weather Widget uses ESP8266 to retrieve local weather information from web and displays it on a 128×64 OLED Display. The device is capable to display current date, time, and weather information as well as future forecasting for 3 days. The real-time weather data are fetched from the Weather Underground (http://www.wunderground.com) website using an API Key.
ESP8266 Weather Widget
Piano gloves is another interesting project accomplished by three Cornell students, Sean Carroll, Natalie Moore, and James Talmage, who just passed Bruce Land’s ECE 4670 course on microcontrollers. They created a pair of gloves that can play a grand piano sound with the bending of fingers. A flex sensor attached to each finger on the gloves senses when the user bends a finger. The sensor output goes to a PIC32 processor via a Schimitt trigger circuit. The PIC32 processor, on detecting finger motions, synthesizes and plays appropriate notes on a speaker through a 12-bit DAC.
PIC32 Project: Piano gloves
They write,
The genesis of this design came from an interest in sound synthesis as well as one of our team members being a musician. Previous 4760 projects have controlled music through glove interfaces so we attempted that ourselves on the PIC32.
The main design for this project was made up of two main components, which happened to be the hardware and software. The hardware component was made up of 10 Schmitt trigger circuits each connected to a flex sensor corresponding to a finger for a pair of hands. The software was loaded onto PIC32 and could read in signals from 10 digital IO ports and simulate a piano key press corresponding to the octave from C3 to C4, as well as the keys D4 and E4.
Matthew Filipek‘s DIY smart watch is PIC32-powered and features a 1.7 inch touch screen, SD card, Bluetooth module, and other apps with total cost of build less than $100.
Matthew writes,
The watch currently has 3 apps: a settings app where the user can set screen brightness, change the time and date, and change the theme of the user interface; a game app, where the user controls a small paddle with the touch screen and attempts to deflect balls into goals; and a paint app, where the user touches to draw one of 8 selectable colors to the screen. The watch also has Bluetooth functionality, where it relays the time and date to a paired device upon receiving any character from said device.
An elastic strap is used to tether the watch to the user’s wrist. In order to extend battery life, the screen is set to turn off after 10 seconds of inactivity on the home screen. The watch wakes when a button on the side is pressed, and the sleep timeout is disabled if the user decides to proceed past the home screen. A resistive touchscreen on the TFT is used to navigate through menus and use the apps. Date and time are displayed on the home screen. Touching the screen anywhere will bring the user from the home screen to a menu with all of the app icons. The user may then select an app by pressing on it. The apps also make use of the touch screen for user input. The 600mAh LIPO battery can be charged with an on-board charger. There is a mini-USB port on the side of the watch for powering the charger.
PIC32 smart watch
Zhiyong Hao and Zhuo Chen from Cornell University designed a new type of ‘Wake-up Assistant’ for their ECE 4760 course’s final project. Powered by a PIC32 processor, it is designed to wake up a person in a more comfortable and effective way, compared to a normal noisy alarm clock. Their system includes an LED light that works as a reading light before going to bed and brightens gradually in the morning time to simulate the sunrise. An accelerometer placed under the pillow monitors and analyzes the motion of the sleeper to detect when he/she is in a light sleep phase and is ready to be awaken through a vibration motor under the pillow. The system also allows the user to record voice messages and use them as alarm sound. The design is also made friendly for short naps, during which gradual LED lightening and motion-activated vibration motor alarm are disabled so that the user could take full use of the sleeping time.
PIC32 Project: Wake-u-up system
In Tutorial 4, we learnt interfacing an HD44780-based LCD to a chipKIT board for displaying alphanumeric output. Today, we will see how to connect a NOKIA 5110 graphical LCD (used in Nokia 5110 cell phones), which is a 84×48 pixel monochrome display of about 1.5″ diagonal in size. The display can be used for graphics, text, and bitmaps.
chipKIT Nokia 5110 LCD interfacing
Nokia 5110 LCD was used in Nokia’s popular 5110 and 3310 model cell phones. It is a 48×84 pixels matrix LCD driven by the low-power PCD8544 controller chip. It is powered by 3.3V and includes on-chip generation of LCD supply and bias voltages, thus requiring minimum external components for its operation. The PCD8544 receives display data and commands from a microcontroller through a serial bus interface. There are multiple Nokia 5110 LCD modules in the market; they all come pre-mounted on a PCB and look similar but the pin arrangements might be different in some modules. This is a very popular display among the Arduino community because of its low cost (~$3 on eBay) and simplicity to use with easily available open-source libraries. The LCD requires 5 I/O pins for full control. The pins available in almost every Nokia 5110 LCD modules are listed below: Read more