A display with 16 digits can be used to display quite a lot information. One of these around the house could display some actual data like temperature, time, date or any type of messages. If you want one then take a look at this instructabe posted by Panici.

He used already assembled 16 digit seven segment display from dealextreme. As a driver he has chosen an Attiny85 microcontroller that can also be programmed in Arduino manner by using an Attiny45-85 support package. Once you are in arduino here is a tm1640 library that allows start building what you need without digging too deep.

Greg designed a small sized 8×8 b-color LED matrix toy that allows doing fun stuff. Device PCB matches the size of LED display. It features MSP430G2201 microcontroller that ensures low power consumption because backpack is powered with CR2032 battery.

Software is written in ASM language and compiled with open source naken430asm compiler. If you want to display some graphics, there is a perl script that allows converting PNG in to sprite image. Greg had fun building this toy so he has plans on doing a second version with some improvements he learned with first run.

Tobis had a great X1 espresso machine, but its electrical part wasn’t accurate enough with lack desired functionality. Without hesitation he decided to redo controller part by his own.

He grabbed Atmega16 and graphical OLED display that fit nicely instead original indicator. He measured temperature with thermocouple using MA6674 converter IC. Having graphical LCD here gave Tobis more ways to indicate whats going on inside machine. He added a graph trace of temperature, times and date display. Also microcontroller allows programming various espresso preparation timings and regimes. (translated)

Couple decades ago BASIC language was quite popular. If you feel sentimental about those old style BASIC interpreters then take a look at Geoff’s project so called Maximite. It is a PIC32MX based basic interpreter box that can be used to play with BASIC around. It has 128k of ram on PIC microcontroller, VGA output, PS/2 interface to connect keyboard. Also you can use USB and SD cards to store and load your programs.

Board also has 20 programmable I/O pins that makes it real fun to interact with external hardware. I/O pins can be used for digital and analog voltages. BASIC interpreter supports floating point arithmetic’s, string values with full file I/O. Interpreter can handle up to 40000 program lines per second. If new firmware is released – it can be upgraded easily with bootloader via USB interface.