I bet remotely controlled submarines are really fun stuff as you can explore underwater world without getting wet. Jason’s built underwater ROV submarine is very original solution as its layout is based on PVC pipes.

It seems that design is still under strong development. Despite its first successful tests under water submarine will be upgraded to more flexible platform with things like leak detector, temperature and pressure sensors, air lift balloons,  torpedo, sonar, grabbing arm, artificial horizon, compass, joystick control, AVI video recorder. All these add-ons will require a MCU to controls all bunch of sensors and parameters. But while project is in development, you can see current version of sub in action here. Let’s hope we will see finished version it.

What is good about WiFi radio? Actually it removes the limits of location. You can listen to the radio channels from around the world in pretty high quality. Regular radio is limited to some range from transmitter antenna, this way you can hear mostly local broadcasts. Internet radio isn’t new thing – even wireless radio boxes have been around for a while. You can easily get one for less than $100.

If you are a little bit geeky just build one. In this project various parts from different electronics are used like WL-520gu router, USB audio adapter, VFD display and ATmega8 which ties things together. When put everything in nice black box – it seems that you couldn’t get better looking from store.

This idea might seem a bit crazy, but it’s real. Matthew have built a bidirectional serial terminal with standard PS/2 keyboard input and 54×24 resolution oscilloscope screen. Adapter is built around ATmega168 microcontroller that reads keyboard commands, intake UART communications and generates video signal sent to scope.

As a result you can see a 7-bit ASCII and 60Hz refreshing image in oscilloscope screen. The terminal works like professional one with most features available including graphical configuration menu, selectable baud rate and configuration profiles. Despite the simplicity of hardware, it is a time critical application. For resolution of 54×24 characters AVR has to be clocked at 20MHz. After all, the result looks great. Author even managed to connect a Linux box to its Terminalscope.

Could you count how many passwords and usernames you have to remember? All these social networks, bank accounts, emails – it is easy to forget. Writing in paper and keeping them isn’t best idea. So you might need a password managing system that could securely keep track of all your passwords and usernames without worries to loose or forget.

The whole project is built around Atmel AVR ATmega168 microcontroller that is also equipped with LCD display and keypad. The device plugs to PC via USB port that is driven by software. The passwords are stored into Java Card smart card which is considered safe from cracking. The idea of USB interface is to emulate username and password keystrokes so like user would type them physically.