Probably everyone knows the game of life where area is divided in to cells where each cell in the grid has 8 neighbour cells. By using simple set of rules these cells become alive - they can spawn, modify themselves, do logical operations and even create Turing machines.

The interesting thing on this particular project is that game “Life” is displayed on 4×20 character LCD. LCD is controlled by AVR ATTiny2313 microcontrollr which actually interfaces the LCD and has on boredom button. Interesting fact that character LCD is used as graphical by defining special characters. Project is programmed in C language and compiled with WinAVR compiler tools. Project files are available for download here.

This universal remote control tester can capture IR signals from various TV, Audio, VCR remote controls. Detector part is based on Ubicom SX28 microcontroller that can give up to 50MIPS performance.

Circuit is very simple. It used three different IR sensors to read different kinds of remote controls. Decoded data is sent to PC via RS232 port. Computer software receives and displays IR waveform in convenient form.

FPGA projects can be interesting and fun. For instance this FPGA PAC-MAN arcade game runs on Xilink Spartan3e starter kit. It actually runs on emulated Z80 CPU core.

There are 8 game available where you can switch between Pacman, Pacplus, Pong, MrTNT, MsPac, Crush Roller, Eyes and Lizard Wizard. The game is displayed on VGA screen while controlled with a joystick.

Magnetic stripe cards are still common in many areas. With this reader you can read various types of magnetic cards and display data on LCD screen. Reader is controlled by AVR microcontroller.

To read magnetic cards there is a Panasonic ZU-M2121S451 reader used that communicates with microcontroller by sending serial TTL signals. Site has very detailed description about creating hardware and software. Good source to gain some experience about reading magnetic cards.

This is nice and simple AVR LED game platform with 8×8 dot LED matrix.

Schematic is built around AVR Atmega32 microcontroller which drives bi-color (red-green) LED matrix through shift registers, reads buttons and generates sound. Demo pong game video you can see here. It is hard to say how much fun is to play, but I am sure there is more fun to learn and program it.