This MP3 player project look interesting and cute. Despite its small size it has a great functionality including:

• up to 4GB FAT16 formatted CD/MMC memory card support (now supports SDHC cards);
• low power operation from single AAA Ni-MH battery;
• Up to 256 kBps bitrate at 44,1 kHz supported. VBR may peak at 320 kBps;
• support of ID3 v2.3 tags;
• full control of volume track, pause, skip, directory with 5 way small joystick.
• Real time display from Nokia 3310 (shows bit-rate, sampling rate, elapsed time, song info);
• adjustable LCD contrast;
• Shuffle, random play;
• upgradable software via RS232 bootlaoder.

MP3 player is based on PIC18LF452 along with VS1001K MP3 decoder chip. Great project to put hands on. If you don’t want to mess up with building circuit you can always order a kit and enjoy. It bet it is real fun to listen MP3 from home made player.

SMD chips, there is more potential of using them on a virtual gloves. The glove we are talking about was designed in University of California, Berkeley by Professor Kris Pister students. This glove along with proper software is capable to translate hand gestures in to computer symbols.

Glove has Analog Devices ADXL202 dual axis accelerometers stacked on each of fingers and one additional on back of the hand. SO whole hand movement can be recorded by Atmel AVR microcontroller which sends data to computer via serial port. It can send data via RF channel if needed (not implemented currently).

Microcontroller sends raw data to PC where software has to interpret it in to rotations in order to define hand gesture. Here is a publication article about calculations that software does to recognize gestures. Project files including Orcad hardware, microcontroller ASM code and PC receiving software C source code are free to download and analyse.

Cats had been recognized as the most commonly pet in household.

According to the pet survey, cats and dogs are the top two favorite pets that mostly rear by peoples in their home. The reason why peoples love these two kinds of animals, is mainly related with the loyalty for their master (dogs) and the elegant and its always laid back behavior (cats)

Having cats with a pet or partner is a pleasure experience, as we can learn their daily life habits, behaviors, body languages and their socialization. However, some of the cat lovers facing many problems rearing cats and this can greatly become a great headache for them.

Some of the matters that currently turn into major problems to cat lovers:

• There always so stray cats that break in to your house, crunching and feast themselves with your cat’s food.
• Those neighbor cats always become annoying intruders and messing up your home.
• Hate of washing those “little gift” (The disgusting pooh or urine) left by the stray or neighbor cats.

From now on, you can waive goodbye to the above matters with “Pet Porte“.

I’m known you must be wondered, what is this “Pet Porte” is and how can you fully benefit from this “Pet Porte“.

Well, this Pet Porte is a brand new and high-end technology, which is an awesome selective cat flap that work as sensor. This sensor can consistently senses your cat with their in-build pet ID chip implants.

What’s that mean is your cat can now free itself from the traditional yet old-fashioned collars. The PetPorte works accurately by just reading the cat’s microchip cat flap. Read more »

This mini DigiThermo is a device specially designed for measuring and time and temperature in chemistry laboratory.

The following picture demonstrates the circuit diagram of DigiThermo. Read more »

Usually in electronic projects people choose to use low quality sounds like ISD chips with 8 kHz sampling rate, direct PWM, or end up with MP3 decoders. Las option is to play uncompressed audio files from SD/MMC card via DAC. Such solution can give good sampling rate and good quality especially when sound is filtered and amplified with op-amp.

This project is set up around Arduino board. It takes wave files from CD/MMC card and plays them asynchronously as an interrupt. So there are resources left for additional tasks between them. It can play 22 kHz, 16 bit mono wave files of any size. Files are stored in FAT18 formatted media card - so it is easy to upload new files via standard card reader. All files and libraries are downloadable or as usually you can order a kit to enjoy the music. Over all project is well described - I recommend to read even if you aren’t going to build one. There are some good materials about audio sampling and interfacing SD/MMC cards with arduino.