Little bit of electronics and digital camera can rise you to the next level of photography. In this Packshotnik project there is a platform made with servo motor that spins it 360 degree around and triggers camera via IR or by wire. So what we get here? Simply microcontroller spins object keep shooting camera until rotation is complete. Automatics do this at precise time moments without human interaction. So you get series of accurate still pictures made at exact time moments.

The spinning platform is made of an old 5 ¼” floppy drive that is driven by servo motor with optical feedback. Atmega8 controls motor and camera shutter. There is a simple menu that allows selecting various shutter speeds and rotation speed. You say that same can be done by filming with camera mode, well yes and no actually. DSRL cameras usually don’t have movie feature. Also with camera you get clear and crisp images. Also with camera you can make long exposures in a dark and so on and on. After all, this platform is quite universal to use with any camera including old film based.

If you are a fan of Twitter network, this toy might be interesting to you as it connects to internet and checks status updates on Twitter. But the most fun part is that all electronics is built in Wooden Cuckoo clock. So you get a great functionality and nice interior detail.

The electronics of clock is based on Arduino board with WiFi dongle. Twitter status is displayed on touch screen display. When clock is in idle mode it shows an analog on LCD. Once twee status is updated a Cuckoo announces it. Don’t set it to hot channels as cuckoo will start annoy you with frequent updates J

Emulator is software that runs on some CPU and emulates another CPU or MCU so you could run programs and games without need of right one. There are lots of emulators for PC including PC emulators itself like Virtual PC or VMWare. But let’s leave them behind as they are more professional stuff. Let’s look at more lightweight stuff here. Sprite_tm has decided to emulate an old good Z80 on AVR ATMega88 microcontroller. To be more specific to be able running software there has to be CP/M machine emulated.

AVR microcontroller is pretty low on RAM (1K for ATMega88) for such task so he used an external DRAM chip (GM71C4256A 128KB). CP/M used floppy discs but instead there is a MMC/SD card used. And last thing is display. For this simple UART terminal is used as there is only character based data only. Hardware is easy – firmware is another part that met many road blocks, but hey its working, not 100% accurate but working.

Weather monitoring is pretty cool especially if your activity is related to climate changes. Or sometimes it is simply interesting to see the history in convenient format. Most temperature recorders are limited to blind logging to some media storage and current value display, but it is more fun to see temperature log right away without need to transfer data to PC and generate trace. So this project is actually what many will find useful and convenient.

It has a large 160×128 graphical LCD that is capable to display temperature and pressure trace over 3 days. The project is built around PIC16F876 microcontroller that is interfaced to Motorola MPX5100AP absolute pressure sensor and Maxim DS18S20 temperature sensor. So using such recorder will show how weather changed during last 3 days and will give some clue what’s coming in near future due to barometric changes (increase of pressure indicates better while decreasing pressure leads to wet and muggy weather).