Probably you know that programming Arduino is easy task even for novice. So if you are just starting electronics and looking towards robotics, this Motorduino might be a great starting point.

This board equipped with all necessary interfaces to start with various motors including regular and servos. It also allows easily adding various sensors without additional need of Arduino shields. Despite various peripherals, Motorduino is still compatible with additional standard Duemilanove shields just in case you need more interfacing or expanding. They are working on final tweaks before letting board out. Stay tuned.

This TV terminal made by Vassilis Serasidis has been around quite some time and served lots of people as a great project or at least as reference to new designs. If you missed it – you just need to check it out. Well this TV terminal can completely replace any indicator that you usually use in your embedded design.

So TV terminal is capable of displaying 40 chars in 25 lines or 80×75 points in semi graphical mode. TV terminal is built around ATmega8 microcontroller that is clocked at 20MHz and it is still a trade off because originally 22MHz would be needed. Despite sending info to TV device also accepts keystrokes from standard PC keyboard and data from RS232 channel. So this makes device pretty universal which can act as a TV display controller for other embedded projects or simply accept data from PC via RS232 interface.

If you are starting with microcontrollers you are probably looking for simple guides or examples how to drive one or another peripheral with microcontroller like AVR.

In the internet you will probably find tons of information and examples how to drive standard 20 character x2 line text LCD. But hey – one more wouldn’t hurt to check you as probably in each new tutorial you can find something new and useful.

Are you feeling tired of paying large electric bills? Probably you feel that some tweaking in home electric system would save couple bucks. So why not to try, but for this you will probably need a power level monitor to determine where are biggest usage of electric. Building power level monitor can be quite easy – there can any microcontroller be used for this. In this case a LPC2138 ARM7 microcontroller has been chosen which, I think, probably is too powerful for such simple task.

The simple idea of design is to sense current and step down voltage to level acceptable to MCU IO ports. The current sensor is made of transformer with some modifications. Device detects zero crossings of voltage and current in order to determine the phase shifts so it could calculate power RMS correctly. Power level information can be viewed in two ways – via 7 segment LED indicator mounted directly on device or it can be sent via USART to monitor it computer screen and probably so some statistics. The full project can be downloaded here.