Not everyone adores Arduino and this is great because other systems are great too. MSP430 has gained popularity since cheap launchpad release. So if you like MSP430 here are great news – a Launchpad GamingPack was developed that enables developing video games without digging too deep in resource hungry applications.

Gaming Pack shield has two ports for NES gaming controllers – no problem to build two player games. The power lies inside FPGA which takes care of 400×300 VGA and sound output. Shield uses same rendering technique as in the Gameduino. Shield communicates to launchpad using SPI interface. There are several games developed to demonstrate it capability. These include Brick breaker, Tetris, and well known space invader. Examples can be found at GitHub.

Building robots is pretty complex task. One side is mechanical and another is control. Arduino platform is great for non professionals. So if you are more mechanical guy then Arduino may be a big savior for interfacing and writing software. There are lots of Arduino shields available that mostly are used for motor control and lack some functionality that is needed in robotics.

Open-electronics introduces pretty attractive shield specially designed to control robots. IT has some handy features including: high input voltage range, stabilized output voltage for servos, ultrasonic obstacle sensor, IR remote control receiver. Shield also powers Arduino board with stabilized 5V. Shield can be battery powered – typical requirement for robotics. There are plenty demo programs available where you can build simple robots and test them right away starting with bi-walker and spider bot. Just point TV remote and have fun.

Some time ago it was proven than LEDs can work as light source and as detectors. This time this effect was scaled to 64 bi-color LED matrix. The project called doodler enables drawing with laser pointer directly on matrix where each LED responds with one of two colors.

Circuit is built around Atmega48 which senses photo-effect current and controls LEDs using latches. This technique opens new area of game development or simply building larger scale interactive displays.

Brian has been using solar panels and solar collectors in his house for some time. Earlier he used an Arduino and IOIO board for data logging. But lately he moved to well known Raspberry Pi platform that gives much more space to work with.

Still using a Raspberry PI for such task is quite an overkill but its fun indeed. It pulls sensor data from various sensors including i2C Microchip MCP980, 1-Wire DS18B20 on solar collector; ACS712 current sensor in low voltage part and mains current using Elkor i-Snail-VC transducer. Raspberry Pi has MCP3428 16-bit ADC on-board to read transducer values. Since Pi board runs Linux it is obvious that all hard job is done using Python. Brian even made a custom DC-DC power supply that fits nicely on top of Raspberry Pi board. His future plans are to push data in to MySQL instead of using direct HTTP GET upload method.