Temperature and relative humidity display with adaptive brightness control

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The objective of this project is to illustrate a technique of implementing adaptive brightness control to seven segment LED displays. It consists of a closed loop system that continuously assesses ambient light condition using an inexpensive light-dependent resistor (LDR) and uses that information to adjust the brightness of the display. For the proof of concept, the technique is applied to construct a digital temperature and relative humidity meter that adapts the brightness of the seven segment LED displays to the surrounding lighting conditions. There are 8 seven segment LED displays used in this project and they are all driven by

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Dual 4-digit seven segment LED display with SPI interface

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This project is an extension of my previous MAX7219 based SPI seven segment LED display module. The new display features eight 7-segment displays arranged in two rows of four digits. The on-board MAX7219 driver enables you to easily add eight 7-segment LED displays to your project using only 3 I/O pins of microcontroller. The major advantage of using this board is the time-division multiplexing operations required for continuous refreshing of the display digits are performed by the MAX7219 chip, thereby keeping the microcontroller free for doing other pressing tasks. It is suitable for displaying two variable values simultaneously in a

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PIC12F microcontroller project board

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The 12F series of PIC microcontrollers are handy little 8-pin devices designed for small embedded applications that do not require too many I/O resources, and where small size is advantageous. These applications include a wide range of everyday products such as hair dryers, electric toothbrushes, rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, and blenders. Despite their small size, the PIC12F series microcontrollers offer interesting features including wide operating voltage, internal programmable oscillator, 4 channels of 10-bit ADC, on-board EEPROM memory, on-chip voltage reference, multiple communication peripherals (UART, SPI, and I2C), PWM, and more. The following project board is designed for fast

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chipKIT Project 1: Digital thermometer using an LM34 sensor

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In Tutorial 3, we learnt how to use chiKIT ADC channels to read an external analog voltage and convert it into a digital number. We also discussed about interfacing a standard Hitachi 44780-based character LCD to the chipKIT Uno32 board in Tutorial 4. Now it’s time to implement the knowledge we have gained so far to make our first practical application using chipKIT, which is a digital thermometer. Since temperature is a non-electrical entity, the first thing we need is a transducer or sensor to convert it into an electrical signal. In this project, we will use the LM34 sensor

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Play the classic Breakout game with hand motions

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A group of students at Cornell university designed a new version of the classic Breakout game. The traditional way of playing the game is through key presses that moves the paddle left and right in order to bounce the traveling ball upward, keeping it in play. However, in this new design the player can move his hand left, right, up, or down to control the paddle accordingly. A CCD camera was used to sense the motion of the hand. The image captured by the camera was processed by the Altera® DE2 FPGA Development board to detect the hand position in the image

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