This is very nice looking binary clock that is equipped with 6×4 cool blue-phosphor neon lamps. It is designed to display binary time, but also it can play animations or do other stuff when programmed.

Clock is powered by AVR ATmega328 microcontroller. MCU takes a 60Hz signal from mains and then converts it to timing reference. So no RTC here what leads to lower accuracy as mains AC voltage frequency fluctuates a bit due to grid load intensity. But overall design looks great especially with these neon bulbs.

Rocketry is very exciting hobby. But building and letting plain rockets wouldn’t be so fun without countdown. For this you don’t need much – An Arduino, ULN2003 chip to actuate relay and dot matrix LED display – the bigger the better.

You can guess what it does actually. So code is pretty simple. When button is pressed countdown starts. When it reaches zero, Arduino triggers the relay where the ignition is connected. That’s it – enjoy the show.

Well this sounds interesting and seems it is even more actual. Humanity consumes more and more energy every day. When talking about electrical energy – we still depend on electricity that isn’t clean. So why not to start saving. This project won’t lower your electrical bills but will help to save mother Earth a bit.

Circuit simply tries to detect when power grid is on a heavy load and delays switching on non crucial devices until high-load period passes. From technical point of view it is enough to monitor AC frequency. If it drops a little below normal 50Hz (or 60Hz) then it indicates that line is loaded and generators feel some brake that tries to stop them. This task is led for Olimex LPC-2478-STK with ARM7 processor. It is overkill for such project but this gives more abilities like touch screen interface and WEB ability. Of course one human with such device wouldn’t make a difference but if all would add some adaptive flexibility it could lower pollution on global bases.

Project is pretty interesting as it uses La Fonera WiFi Access Point running OpenWrt that takes care of reading signal information. The other part is left for ATmega88 which reads buttons, outputs information to 16×4 LCD screen.

Microcontroller communicates with AP via UART, while in access point there is a Ruby script running and taking care of sending actual data upon request. What this device actually does? – It scans the area for WiFi, shows channel, SSID, and MAC information. And of course some additional goodies:

“- displaying networks found by airodump-ng
- deauthentication of a selected client
- connecting to an unsecured network and scanning i with nmap
- several attacks using mdk3
- displaying CPU and memory usage”