Generating unique and protective passwords can be a tough challenge for many people. As password cracking algorithms are getting smarter and faster - you need to really secure passwords everywhere if you want to feel safer.

If you want to look cool and have a handy tool, you can build a portable password generator, which is easy to assemble, because there is already a small AVR development board from Olimex used. Password generator can fit in to your pocket. Password generator can generate 16 character random alphanumeric passwords. It allows adjusting the length of generated password or select to use or not special characters. Program is developed in AVR BASCOM language.

There are tons of various development boards around the internet. If you are looking for one - might be this one will fit your needs. It is featured with

• ATMega32 MCU clocked at 16MHz;
• RS232;
• RS485;
• I2C EEPROM (64KBytes);
• 4-way Piano Switch;
• Reset and some LEDs;
• 2 x 40 pin DIL breakout connectors.

Board is 100×75mm size with tracks on both sides. Probably it is best to send Gerber files to your nearest PCB manufacturer and get professionally looking PCB.

Probably most of more experienced developer of embedded systems has built an mp3 player. It is not really hard as it may look like. It is because specialized mpeg decoder IC’s are used. It is all about using prebuilt libraries and some interfacing.

This particular mp3 player is built around ATmega128 microcontroller that reads data from old 2.5″ laptop hard drive. MP3 player uses STA013 Mpeg decoder IC that sends decoded audio through CS4334 Stereo DAC (24-bit). Player software and hardware files are available for download. Check out for newer versions where various control interfaces like keypad; rotary encoder and remote IR are built.

Probably it is always interesting to modify things you are passionate about. As you know - car panel doesn’t show all information you would like to know during journey. Let’s say you want to follow fuel consumption, display temperatures and control air conditioning, and have centralized control of many other devices like electrical windows, etc.

So here is a nice project for this. It uses AVR microcontroller that is equipped with various sensors and LCD display which shows quite a bunch of info like momentary fuel consumption, momentary speed, journey time, passed distance and many average indicators. First working project version can be found here. Probably there will be another with more improvements.

AVR butterfly is a handy development board from Atmel. It comes with Atmega169V microcontroller and other handy peripherals like LCD indicator. So control and indication is ready, the MP3 decoding part has to be handled on other PCB.

For MP3 decoding there is a VS1001K chip used which has on-board DAC with sufficient power to drive headphones. Interesting thing is that this MP3 player is also capable to drive Nokia3310 LCD screen instead of butterfly original LCD. Player firmware enables to browse directories on SD card, control remotely via serial interface, indicate battery usage. You can find more info and download project files from sourceforge.