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Tag Archives: atmega168

Making a smart I2C DC motor controller

Posted on September 10, 2013 by R-B Leave a comment

A full-fledged DC motor controlling application requires a lot of I/O resources and MCU time. This project is about making a dedicated DC motor controllerthat would release the main microcontroller from this duty so that it could do other important tasks more efficiently. The controller uses Atmega168 as a slave I2C device that receives commands from a host MCU through I2C signal lines, and controls two DC motors using the L293D high-current H-driver chip. Separate PWM signals are used for each motor to achieve precise motor steering. The built-in motor steering library routines makes the motor control much easier.

Smart DC motor controller with I2C interface

2 in 1 : Tetris and Snake with one AVR

Posted on April 19, 2011 by R-B 2 comments

This project describes two games – Tetris and Snake, both programmed inside an Atmega168 microcontroller. You can plug this device to a PAL TV and have fun playing the games. The circuit diagram is very simple and uses resistors to generate composite video output.

Tetris and Snake inside one AVR

A physical display device for website visitors based on Atmega168

Posted on January 20, 2011 by R-B Leave a comment

If you have a blog or website and want to make a physical device to display the number of visitors, this project might be interesting to you. It describes about a similar device that can be directly connected to the internet via router and counts the visitors of your website. The number of visitors is displayed on seven segment LEDs.

Arduino: 24 hours digital clock

Posted on January 18, 2011 by R-B 6 comments

This is an Arduino powered 24-hour digital clock that uses the RTC chip DS1307 for timekeeping. DS1307 has a small battery backup so that it keeps the correct time even the rest of the circuit is not powered. The time is displayed on 5×7 LED dot matrix.

The ATMEGA168 controller and the rest of the circuit is powered by a 9 volt 650 mA power supply with a LM7805 regulator IC.

Power usage monitor using Atmel AVR

Posted on December 13, 2010 by R-B Leave a comment

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. Read more