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.

Arduino has been inspiring lots of projects. So, this one, so called netduino, seems interesting as it is .Net Micro Framework based development board and is open source as well. This means you can program it by using .NNET programming technology that include lots of features like multithreading, event based programming, debugging and more. Board includes a 32 bit Atmel ARM7 microcontroller with 128KB Flash and 30KB RAM.

It has a list of features that are far ahead comparing to regular Arduino. So if you need more power to perform more complex applications consider using this one. And yes – it is compatible to standard Arduino shields.

Building games is one of most passionate activities especially if this involves developing hardware itself. And you know – game system doesn’t have to be shiny and crowded with lots of elements on fine PCB. Simply this can be done on a prototyping board with a bunch wires. This game console has an Atmel ARM7 microcontroller AT91R40008 that is capable of running at 100MHz if overclocked.

Arm processor gives enough processing power to run simple games like Super Mario but to make higher resolution VGA image (224×240 and 256colors) there is more RAM and more resources needed. So there is also a PIC18F4682 microcontroller used that only takes care of generating VGA signals and addressing additional dual-port Ram. Game itself is stored on SD card. Despite the fact that console ir still in deep debugging process you can already enjoy the results in following video.

This project represents a one-wheeled rolling robot that runs by using inertia moment. It has two actuators – driving and steering. Robot is also capable to perform reconnaissance and cooperative tasks. Mechanics is pretty simple – inertial driving force is created by attaching a mass to DC electric motor. Inertial allows not only drive but also jump over obstacles if necessary. Steering is provided by using servo motor which actually tilts axis of rotation.

Robot is controlled by LPC2138 Arm microcontroller which is a part of Keil MCB2130 evaluation board. Microcontroller as usually generates PWM waveform to drive motors. Using an ARM microcontroller there are lots of room left for improvements like adding additional sensors like gyros, accelerometers or other intelligence.

This project appears to be very impressive and useful especially if you like to keep eye on Wikipedia. Actually this is an offline reader that renders offline xml dumps in to readable text. Device is built on NXP ARM Cortex microcontroller (LPC1114) that is capable of running at 72 MHz and has 32K flash along with 8K SRAM. Information is displayed on inexpensive touch screen LCD based on ILI9325.

Wikipedia xml dumps are stored in microSD card. Schematics aren’t ready yet but author promises them soon after some polishing.