I you know a bit about amateur radio probably you’ve heard or seen a telegraphic key. It is a small device with two push buttons “if we can say so” to transmit ‘dit’ and ‘dah’ signals that are used t encode information in to Morse code. Sebastian found them unergonomic and build one using capacitive touch based iambic key.

As a base for this project Sebastian used Attiny45 microcontroller which measures a time taken to charge sensor paddle. There is no other circuitry used as only detection of on and off values are needed. The internal pull up resistor is used to charge cap and then measure voltage with same pin. For more information about this process refer to Arduino CapSense library.

When its time to select a new phone we start looking for different brands with different features. And it is truly hard to find what you need or what you want. We don’t argue with the fact that for everyday use it is best to select a manufactured phone which is small sized, tested and reliable. But for sake of curiosity why not to build another one to play with.

The following project is a cell phone prototype developed by check guy Adam. It is based on Atmega128 microcontroller featuring 128kB of flash and 4kB of SRAM. Barebones cellphone is is equipped with nice big LCD touch screen driven with 16-bit bus. GSM SIM100S module made it possible to make calls and send SMS. Phone is powered with 1000mAh LiPo battery. Probably more fun in it is a software. It seems that Adam spent some time on it to make it convenient and easy to use. It has nice user interface controlled with touch screen. Settings are accessible using icon based menu. You can store contacts so as you would do in a regular phone.

Text based games are one simple way of having some fun. Form hardware perspective it is very simple implementation – you only need a text LCD, few buttons and MCU. Dan has been workingon one so called Hunt the Wumps. Its a retro game that originally were written in 1972 using BASIC.

He used and RGB LCD shield and Arduino UNO. RGB LCD enabled to program different backgrounds depending on danger in a game play.

Victor got a MMA7361 3-axis accelerometer breakout board from eBay and wanted to make something useful with it. So he made a modular board layered with PIC16F887 and blue LED one. The intent of it was to put it on a car for some nice effects due to acceleration but it stayed on a desk just to play around.

There are 48LEDs used in different direction layout – that’s 8 LEDs for every direction. They are driven using serial-in-parallel-out shift registers. There is also a beeper attached to beep once a 0G is detected.