Ok, it won’t be a new project for some of you here, especially the LED Matrix. Maybe you’ve involved with LED Matrix more than once, twice or several times, but it’s still a fun to develop a brand new LED Matrix in different method.

For this project, you’ll have to make an LED matrix display in 16×24 Green SMD LED matrix. Beside that, you must apply a driver for it. In this case, you can use shift registers to sink the columns and a line driver of some sort to source the rows.

To be honest, the matrix is a lot bigger, as it used eight IO lines to drive each row. Since the matrix has sixteen rows, you can use an ATmega168 and a 4:16 de-multiplexer to control all sixteen rows with only four IO pins. Read more »

Ok, robot isn’t a new thing, especially in this 21^st century, where everything is related with technical and robotics. Honestly, it isn’t too hard to develop our own robot. Believe it or not, you can build a wall avoiding robot in several hours!

Hold on a second. You must know the main goal of the project, before you involving yourself into it. For your information, this wall avoiding robot is special and different than others. It’s not only able to avoid walls and obstacles, but it helps you to transfer some little parts from one location to another location inside your home.

Frankly, there are many parts that needed for developing this wall avoiding robot. The robot is based on a Microcontroller by Atmel called the Atmega168. The reason why Atmega168 is being used, as it’s not only fast and cheap, but also very easy to be implemented with other components.

In order to save more time, it’s better to use the USB Arduino, as it supports USB and has the built-in boot-loader. Plus, it has free programming software that is similar to C++. In this case, it cuts off the time and allows you to build the robot even faster!

Sometimes, people are very vulnerable, as they’re having constantly getting affected by the environment’s changes surrounding them. Let’s take an example. Did you know that there is a disease called ‘SAD’ (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and only happens on people during the winter?

Basically, SAD is a mood disorder. Although it can’t be deadly, but it will cause some severe symptoms on the people, such as irritability, oversleeping, tiredness, not being able to get out of bed on time, depression and joint pain. Honestly, it can be very torturing, as the people who getting this SAD needs to suffer with it throughout the winter.

In order to avoid the problem happening on you, it’s better for you to build a LED Sunrise Alarm Clock.

Well, believe it or not, this small LED Sunrise Alarm Clock would provide adequate bright light, just like the sunrise’s light. Every time when the alarm clock is ringing, it starts to emit the bright sunrise light, which is mean time to wake up from bed!

The project is built and run on an ATmega168, where is fully open source. You wouldn’t have any problem to get this thing done, even all by yourself.

Don’t just standing there, grab the chance, develop a LED Sunrise Alarm Clock, and wipe the SAD away during the winter.

Dungeon and Dragons, isn’t this sounds familiar to you? Yep, it’s one of the history most popular games. For those that born and raised on 70s and 80s, you knew that this is probably the only game that dominated the world. Most of the family in this era will at least have one set of D&D or more…

Believe it or not, Dungeon and Dragons have been remained as the best-known yet best-selling role-playing game of all time. The survey estimated that there are more than 20 million people having played the game once or more in their lifetime!

If you’re happened to be one of the loyal Dungeon and Dragons’ players, then you know that it’s very messy to roll many different kinds of dice during the game! Well, there is a solution here, and it’s up to you to build it out.

This smart designation is known as “Acceleration-sensitive LED Matrix”. Well, it’s an n-sided dice, which means it can displays many different dice’s forms.

The project is driven by three 1.5V small button cells and it’s based on an ATmega168. The MCU is being connected to the matrices using a ULN2008 as a current sink and a 74LS164 as LED driver.

Well, it’s pretty simple to roll the dice. All you have to do here is choose the number of sides of the dice, and then you just tilt the dice. It shows the number immediately! With this magical dice, it would be a great fun to play the Dungeon and Dragons all night long, as you don’t need to worry about the missing dice anymore.

Talking about the Atmel STK500 EVB, how many of you here ever get in touch with it before? For those that involved with it before, then it’s great for you, while for those that didn’t know what’s all about, you should spare a few minutes and read this on…

Believe it or not, the Atmel STK500 EVB is by far one of the unbeatable starter kit development system. It equipped with these following great features:

1. Eight switches;
2. Eight LEDs;
3. A variable;
4. Software programmable AREF voltage;
5. Variable power supply.

Basically, the Atmel STK500 EVB board is already included with DIP sockets for all AVRs. The best part about it is the STK 500 EVB equipped with an ATMega168, which is very awesome indeed!

Today, you’re going to learn how to configure the Atmel STK500 EVB as an Arduino-based development system board. As you see that the STK500 is requiring to be wired and the jumper must set as shown in the below figure:

By the way, you should be aware that in case the PC doesn’t have a serial port but only USBs, then a USB to serial adapter is needed to interface the STK500 to the PC. Furthermore, an RS232 is acquiring in first instance to interface the STK500 evaluation board with the PC.