You’re a home hobbyist that loves to spend most of the time developing cool and creative electronic stuffs? However, you still wish to create a super Arduino board that has many awesome features on a single board?

Well, congratulation as you’ll try to learn to develop the Sanguino board today! Ok, first thing first, the meaning of “Sanguino” is a red and fun microcontroller board, which is based on the ATmega644P.

If you’re already bored of the Arduino or wiring board, where the latter one can be costly indeed, then you can test your talent by simply design your very own Sanguino board! Since the Sanguino development project is only requires the Arduino software and it’s all in the open source, thus you won’t have any problem creating your own powerful yet multipurpose Sanguino board!

Sanguino board has the following cool features, which made it unique than the Arduino and there are:

• The Atmega644P core
• 32 total general purpose I/O pins
• Eight analog pins
• Six Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) pins
• 64K flash memory
• 4K RAM
• 2K EEPROM
• Two hardware serial ports and
• 100% open source (this is the coolest part!)

When you’re done with this project, you’ll have a cute yet powerful little Sanguino board, which you can apply it for the prototyping, hacking or for any permanent porjects (Of course, you shouldn’t use it for the hacking purposes

For those of you that always involved yourself with the IR transceiver, you must know how annoying when it cannot even transmit and receive infrared signals as it should be…

Thus, for overcome this matter, you’d better DIY a more powerful Serial Port IR Transceiver, rather than just pick out the money from your wallet and buy it at the electronic store!

Firstly, you should use the PIC12F508 microcontroller as the main brain of this project. Why? It is because it is an Air-Byte transceiver, which is actually a tiny 8-pin PIC microcontroller. The another reason of using this PIC is it can simply monitors the GPIO, 0 connected to the PC serial port TX pin #3. As a result, when this pin transits from logic low to logic high, the PIC12F508 microcontroller will generate the 40 kHz IR carrier. During the low periods, the carrier is mostly in the suppressed condition.

Thus, this will provide a simple method for the IR to receive those serial data on one pin, and then outputting the serial data that are being received on another modulated at the IR detectors band-pass frequency. It’s definitely a very simple and effective method!

You have been very frustrated about the already setup PIC programmer, and wish that you can have an easier to have a PIC programmer, which can be re-programmed easily?

Instead of complaint about the matter, it is better to DIY a sophisticated PIC-Programmer for your own use…

The PIC-Programmer that you are going to develop was a modification of a JDM-Programmer. This mean you have to connect the PIC-programmer with the serial com port of your computer! Since this device don’t even need any additional external power supply, thus you’ll save a lot of money here.

Ok, you must be wondered that what types of PIC microcontrollers and EEPROM’s you should use in this project. Well, since there is no any restriction for the PIC microcontrollers and EEPROM, you can use this PIC-burner for PIC12C50x, PIC12F62x, PIC16Fxx, PIC16F62x and EEPROM 24Cxx.

Compared with the other projects, this PIC-programmer is regarding as one of the easy to build and compact electronics project. The three LEDs on the board are used to indicate the state of the burning process. The signal for each light is different, which as:

1. Red LED indicates burning;
2. Yellow LED indicates clock-signal; and
3. Green LED indicates power supply!

Lastly, hope you’ll have a great moment with this PIC-programmer!

Can you ever imagine that what is the combination of laser modem and Arduino microcontroller looks like? Well, you might think that it will be a hard task and requires many complicated steps to get these two different components assembled, but it is easier than you’re thinking of…

Let’s cut the long story short and get this project started right away…

You’ll need to apply the serial data transition from an Arduino controller using a standard red laser, photo transistor and an instrumentation amplifier. Before that, please do make sure that you’ve ordered an IR LED and phototransistor pair from the local electronic store with some spare ATMega168 microcontrollers.

After that, is time to start the first experiment by simply using the IR LED to transmit 2400 baud serial to the phototransistor. Therefore, you have to program the Arduino Diecimilia with the sample serial program, which it’s altering the baud rate and will allow it to run in a continuous loop!

This is surely an interesting and challenging project, hope you all will enjoy it and having fun with it!