Many chess players, especially those advanced level chess players are very hard to find those competitors that have same level skill. Hence, many of them are overjoyed, if they’ve found someone that have the equivalent chess playing skill with them!

Well, if you’re one of the talented chess players and having some difficulty to search for the opponents, then you should consider to build an artificial intelligent Chess playing robot, which is known as “Robochess”.

By the way, don’t think that the chess playing robot is one of the late 20^th century inventions, as there’s a chess playing machine called “The Turk” has been constructed in the late of 18^th century! Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804), the proud inventor of The Turk has built the automation chess player to impress the Empress Maria Theresa.

Guys, this is how the Robochess works:

• First of all, it recognizes the opponent’s movements.
• Then, it analyzes the next move.
• After it, it automatically picks up one of the pieces and moves them.
• Lastly, the result will be displaying in LCD.

This Robochess is built based on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller, which is an ATmega128 that contain 128 Kbyte of Flash Memory and 4 Kbyte of Ram.

By the way, the entire chessboard is covered with 64 Reed Relay (Magnetic sensor), where is being placed in the bottom of board.

You’ve searched all over the places to find the genuine color TFT LCD controller? Honestly, you’re mostly getting nothing from the searching, as most of the affordable and small color LCDs are being controlled by particular chips, where these chips didn’t available to the public at all!

Yeah, you must be very frustrated when you found out the truth, isn’t it? Well, there’s always some good solutions for any problem. Since the stuff you’re looking around doesn’t available on the market, then it’s time to build your very own color TFT LCD controller.

For your information, the color TFT LCD controller that you’re going to build here is different from the ordinary, where it uses two AVR microcontrollers to generate the signals needed to control a color TFT LCD.

For the display, a 160×240 dot Sony ACX705AKM will be the perfect choice. By the way, an ATMega8515 microcontroller is being used in this project, due to its efficiency in collecting the color pixel data from static RAM and controls the LCD by generating digital CRT video signals!

Beside that, an ATMega128 will be used as the second microcontroller, where the ATMega128 will interpret graphic command received via RS-232, and stores the resulting pixels in the static RAM.

You cannot miss this stuff, as it is an inexpensive and flexible project.

HackAday have posted a nice tutorial on how to run dumb terminal built from Atmega128.

With simple hardware you can have handy tool that can help to rescue a headless server or simply use as minicomputer with keyboard and LCD screen. Device can work with windows and Linux. But with Linux you can see the real power of usage. Curious? – Just connect device and start Linux booting on PC – you will seethe whole booting process where you will have to interact by “Pressing any key and event entering Login information.

Measuring device is combined of mini application module with Atmega128 microcontroller and two SFR04 sonic modules. Measuring principle is very simple. Measure time between sonic transmission and echo reception and then divide it by sound speed in this environment. Timing is explained in this diagram.

Calculated distance is displayed on LCD screen. Sonic distance meter can measure distances from 3cm up to 3 meters and can reflect form 3 cm obstacles at 2 meter distance. I would say quite good addition to some robotic platform. Source codes are written for AVR-GCC compiler and can be downloaded form site.

Traffic warning system or so called TDDY(Traffic Data Display ) is a vehicle-mounted, receive-only traffic warning system designed by Dubravko Gacina. System may be used to minimize the risk of vehicle like like public buses, emergency response vehicles, cabs, delivery vehicles accidents. An ATmega128 microcontroller and a matrix of 512 bi-color LEDs organized as a map of the Los Angeles freeways comprise the system.

Collisions between emergency vehicles and other vehicles are common events. Many of these collisions occur at inter-sections. Public vehicles approaching at 90 degrees to the direction of travel of emergency vehicles are very difficult to see. Sensors mounted on the vehicle could alert emergency vehicle drivers of approaching cross traffic. In such a scenario, sensors sends information to some sort of dispatching center which process incoming data and, in return, sends data to interested parties in form of positional information to traffic warning devices mounted in vehicles.

This design presents an early implementation of traffic warning device. Conventionally, it uses server software hosted on PC and pager which serves as client to display position of vehicles on city map. You can download project files here .