Looking for more microcontroller ideas? Well take a look at super toaster project. This isn’t very practical usage of microcontroller and web interface but who knows it may be a part of future fully automated and web controlled toaster J Anyway this sounds fun – open browser and load toaster web page where you can select toast level and press the button. In a minute you get your toast nice and shiny.

OK, web based toaster has more useful features than making impossible toasting for your mom. It could log events from kitchen with proper sensors. Instead of toasting you could log from anywhere and check if you left the stove on. The whole fun is based on WIZ200WEB module that comes with WIZnet Ethernet module and ATmega128 microcontroller. It gives enough power and pins to do much more fun in your kitchen than toasting only. You can also download a nice presentation of entire project here.

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.