This is an interesting way of playing music. A standard resistive touchscreen can be really great input device for such musical instrument. It only requires four wires for input. Well.. ADC inputs. But most microcontrollers have even more of those. What about output? A PWM modulation works like a charm. Rohit Gupta built a touchscreen piano using MSP430G2231 microcontroller.

To read touchscreen coordinates he used TI App Note where you can find pretty all details. Also his previous experiments with generating PWM tones on MSP430 also were used here. To make it easier play, he drew a grid on paper and put back of resistive film. All is left to play a good melody. I think kids would love such project.

Having weather data is almost as important as knowing time. So weather station is a second device after clock at home, isn’t it? How to make it eye catching and easy to understand at the glance. Martin seems to be found an interesting solution. He built analog display for weather device. On display face you can see couple arrows indicating weather conditions while another displays temperature.

Behind the scene you will find MSP430G2553 microcontroller which drives two servo motors where arrows are attached. It gets weather data from PS via UART. On PC a python script simply fetches the weather data from Internet. After such success, Martin plans to push project towards Raspberry Pi, so there would be no need for PC.

If you have a digital camera you probably noticed that in many cases remote control for it is a “must have” thing. Prices as always are high especially when you know that there is nothing special in to that. So the end option is to build one by yourself. Pushkarov took a MSP430 G2231 microcontroller and build using simple schematic. MCU simply controls IR LED through transistor key. Single button triggers the action.

It is assembled on protoboard and is powered from coin sell. Microcontroller is in DIP package, so it was easy to flash using TI launchpad. It really takes no time to build, but may help a lot.

Power consumption is important factor on battery driven devices. We all want them to last longer. In order to build energy efficient projects testing is necessary step. Small changes in circuit or in microcontroller software may lead to different current drain.

MechG has built a handy power meter dedicated for breadboard tests. It is based on MSP430G2402 microcontroller which samples voltage and current consumption of target circuit and then calculates power usage. Data is displayed on LCD. It is capable of measuring voltages from 0 to 10V and currents from 0 to 300mA. Measuring resolution is different for uA and mA ranges that are 0.1mA and 0.1uA respectively. Full specs can be found on Google code page. I think this is a “must have“ tool for any circuit you design – even if it’s not battery operated.