This buggy is really fun way of keeping parrot busy all day. It’ small four wheel platform with a place for bird to sit and simple joystick control where parrot can move buggy in all direction with beak.

From technical point of view it is not only a joystick controllable drive. It also has some intelligence which takes in to action once bird is taken away. Buggy finds a way to the docking station. Docking station consists of two colorful spheres that are captured with camera. Algorithm process the image and gives command to align buggy so that spheres were aligned. Of course there are some electronics working to make this happen. Firs of all the brain. It is a Beagle board which takes care of camera, wireless comm and giving commands to motor. Lower level electronics like motors and sensors are controlled by pair of Atmega168 microcontrollers. I think any trained domestic animal would find such buggy to be fun to ride.

Probably one of most common projects among embedded starters is Larson scanner. It is basically a row of LEDs that runs lights with fading effect like Cylons eyes from Battlestar Galactica or KITT Knight Rider movies. If your next project is gonna be Larson scanner you may want to check out this thorough tutorial that may save you some time.

Tutorial is based on AVR Atmega168 microcontroller. Circuit is really simple for this 8 LEDs with current limiting resistors and ISP header for programming. In particular case you can program Arduino board directly for this. Program is written in C and all parts of it is well commented. Basically there is no wonder – only PWM play.

Graduation only comes a few times on a man’s life – unless you decide to take up 40 courses [like a woman I saw on TV]. That’s why many graduating students tend to pick up the best dress, best shoes and even decorate the graduation gown and hat just to stand out in the midst of a large graduating crowd [where everybody looks the same] and embed themselves in the crowd’s memory. When deprived of the chance to shine, Victor found a neat way of embedding himself in people’s digital memory while still blending in. The key? Infrared lights! Infrared can’t be seen by the naked eye but ooh yes but! It can be seen/detected by digital cameras and camcorders.

Inconspicuous LED Graduation Hat from RazorCustom on Vimeo.

Victor put together infrared LEDs and placed them in ‘strategic’ locations [hat edges, gown buttons] – this is the blend in part. Using an ATMega168 to store and sequence a series of blinks, Victor was able to output “Congratulations Class of 2011” in morse code. Successfully embedding your embedded geeky signature in graduation pictures of others especially without anyone noticing is something you don’t usually get away with – congratulations!

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 »