Probably logic analyzer isn’t a “must have“tool for most hobbyists. You won’t need it probably at all if you are dealing with simple projects. But if one day you will miss it – don’t rush to buy one. Build one!

If you have a scope on a table – let it do the job. All you need is to build a simple PIC18F26K20 based circuit that takes 4 or 8 logic inputs and converts them to oscilloscope signal. Logic analyzer uses one scope channel and TRIGGER input for triggering display.

Arduino fans were stuck with pretty low memory in Aruino boards. Biggest MCU built in and supported was with 32kB of Flash. But we know that AVRs can do much more that this. It seems that things had changed. Finally you can have Arduino with Atmega1280 MCU where you get plenty of memory, plenty of IOs.

Latest Arduino Mega from Arduino team has expanded the board with Atmega1280 to have 54 digital (with 14 PWM feature), 16 analog, 4 UARTs. Of course it kept earlier Arduino features – so it is still compatible with all earlier shields that worked with duemilanove. Imagine what now you can do with so many IOs and 128KB of flash, 8KB SRAM and 4 KB of EEPROM.

All that wouldn’t be possible with new release of Arduino IDE software, where among bug fixes and new functions is a third-party hardware support added. So thanks to this probably we will see many new major Arduino releases. Let the Arduino Mega be the first breaking the front line.

Probably you’ve heard lots of about various OS’es for microcontrollers like RTOS, eCos and so on. But none of them are targeted for Arduino. Well probably Arduino is too low in memory for such bit players. But Thomas W. Holtquist from skewworks.com made it real. Pyxis OS is operating system for Arduino. It is able to run separately compiled programs directly from microSD card and the number of programs is only limited in card size.

After all Pyxis is based on so well known programming principles where you can use standard functions for accessing analog and digital pins or other peripherals, but additionally Pyxis programming language gives ability to use specific functions that allow creating various GUI specific objects like Text boxes, Buttons, Progress bars. To compile programs for Pyxis OS use Pyxis Studio where you can write  programs and compile them in to Pyxis executables (PXE). Other interesting feature is that you can convert ATmega EEPROM in to hard drive (PFAT) where you are able to store files, delete up to 4 instances at once. And of course what OS can be true OS without graphical interface. You can have windows like controls with PyxisTSS. So give it a try and be amazed what Arduino with OS is capable of.

This is small in size mp3 player based on PIC16LF877 microcontroller that works along with vs1001k decoder chip. Player accepts CF cards and seems there are no limits in size.

The player has no display what makes few of free pins available to add any serial LCD if wanted. Because music decoding is entirely done via decoder chip, the PIC processor has plenty of free resources for custom functionality. Once again, this project shows that building mp3 isn’t hard these days especially if you have a proper decoder chip.