Yeah, let’s rock N roll… Wait a minute; I didn’t have any guitar, how can I play the song without a guitar?

It’s surely an embarrassment, especially when you found out that we cannot enjoy some great moment due to the lack of guitar! For overcoming the problem, why don’t you create the experience of playing an acoustic guitar electrically?

Ok, you might think it’s totally ridiculous to reprogram the acoustic guitar electrically, but it’s not impossible to do it. Believe it or not, you can get it done by using vibration sensors, push buttons and the Karplus-Strong algorithm.

Well, here is the basic idea. First of all, you have to remodel an acoustic guitar as closely as possible. Then, it’s time to implement additional functions, which is not available to the conventional guitar. This act will allow the play of the guitar with sound being output to earphones and practice without disturbing others. Plus, it’s also a chord-learning mechanism that based on LED-signaled instructions and many other functions.

In addition, you have to use the Karplys-Strong algorithm to synthesize a plucked string sound signal. Hence, it makes the programmable synthesized guitar becoming a perfect musical instrument that you’ve ever built!

This project is really amazing as it is buil of an 8 bit AVR microcontroller and has touch LCD.

Of cource this one cant beat iPhone as 8 bit processor can’t reach such performance as ARM microcontroller does but its stil fun to be played with. But don’t underestimate the power of this little brother as it has many cool features including 320×240 Lcd with 4 wire resistive touch screen, MP3 player (using ILI9325 chip), USB for PC interfacing and charging, LoPo battery and SD memory card slot.

And of cource software does its tricks as there are only 4K of RAM. But still LCD works pretty smooth while scrolling, it also supports 3D graphics and user interface (UI); mouse or keybord suport via USB, movie palyback, sprite engine. Of cource all this magic cannot fit in to 4K of RAM, so some animations run from SD card. All necesasry source files are located at https://sourceforge.net/projects/microtouch/

For those of you have always wondered, “Is it possible to generate music with our laptop touchpad?” Guess what; your doubt is solved here, as today we’re trying to build an incredible Touchpad with Infrared Music Synthesizer.

Basically, the touchpad with infrared music synthesizer uses a laptop and an infrared distance sensor to control various types of functions, including tone, volume and decay length of musical notes.

This device is operating in one of six modes, which is offering a variety of options for generating musical tones.

It’s very simple to use the device. With only a swipe of fingertips, you can produce interesting music instantly.

Obviously, the main purpose of the Touchpad with Infrared Music Synthesizer is for illustrating a fun approach for music generation.

Those six modes that play in this device are standard, chords, harmonics, double harmonics, decaying harmonics and sinusoidal sound. Once you’ve restarting the device, the default mode of play is automatically in standard mode. It consists of four octaves of individual notes, which can be played according to touchpad positioning. In this case, you can select a new mode, by simply gliding your finger across the touchpad.

The device is built with two ATmega644 MCUs, where is used to control the sound generation and touchpad interfacing. In addition, DDS is necessary for this project, as it used for outputting values to a DAC0808 with a variable input reference voltage from the distance sensor.

Do you have any idea what the JTAG is? To be honest, it’s a parallel port interface for either JTAG or BDM debugging. Well, it might be a little bit slower than a Raven, but it’s a much stable and easy to use device than Raven did.

Today’s project is all about the JTAG Debugger. For your information, this JTAG Debugger is based on an ATmega644 and it’s capable of controlling program execution by setting breakpoints and accessing registers and memory.

The ATmega644 is the big brother of ATmega164, but it has one USART less. By the way, the ATmega644 has the following features, included:

• 64-Kbyte self programming Flash Program Memory
• 4-Kbyte SRAM
• 2-KbyteEEPROM
• 8 Channel 10-bit A/D converter
• JTAG interface for on-chip debug

Different from the other project, this JTAG Debugger used two ATmega644 MCUs. You will program one of the microcontrollers with any arbitrary code, while the other microcontroller (the debugger) contains the actual debugging firmware. Since it has two microcontrollers, hence you’re able to interface with the debugger through a command window on HyperTerminal.

Since the ATmega644 consist an On-Chip Debugger unit, it can executes AVR instructions and set breakpoints without any hassle!

If you’re born in the 70′s or 80′s, then you’ll miss those old times, especially the retro games (Gosh, I still remembered the happy moment when I play the Super Mario with my brother!).

Instead of just missed the old days, why don’t you spends couple of hours and develop the Uzebox project for your own? The Uzebox is a retro-minimalist homebrew fame console, and it’s based on an AVR 8-bit microcontroller from the Atmel.

This project is totally based on an interrupt driven kernel and has no frame buffer. Those functions such as video sync generation, tile rendering, and music mixing are done in realtime format by a background task. As a result, those games can easily be developed in C language!

The main goal of this design is to make a simple yet good enough sound and graphics while it still can leave enough resources to implement interesting games. Beside that, the emphasis is going to put on to make it easy and fun to assemble and program for the home hobbyists.

Two chips were contained in the final design, which are an ATmega644 and an AD725 RGB-to-NTSC converter.