Evilmadscientist have decided to participate in San Jose Museum of Art and have constructed amazing interactive Game of Life board that includes 44 AVR ATmega164P boards where each of them drives 8 cells.

Each LED on the board acts is able to senses nearby objects like your finger with infrared proximity sensors. Each cell has a pair of semiconductors – one is for sending IR light and another is for sensing. This way user is able to light any LED by putting his finger close to cell. The board also has cool control buttons that also shines. So you can ring Game of life by stepping or running. You can always pause or clear the board for new setup.

Wireless is always cool in embedded projects. Why not to give it a try because wireless modules cost pennies these days.

In this simple project 315 MHz TX and RX modules are interfaced to ATtiny13 microcontroller simply to check garage door status and transmit data wireless to receiver. Receiver simply has two LEDs – one door status and another to indicate signal loss.

Do you think you need a keypad to enter door lock code? Well think again. This one uses only one button to enter four digit secret code combinations. The concept is being around in internet. Anyway this is a slight modification ported to AVR ATtiny13 microcontroller.

To enter code there is a simple trick – press button as many times as you need to enter a digit. Once number is entered wait for LED flash then do same for second number. If whole code is correct – garage door opens. The project is pretty straight forward – built on protoboard but it seems to working fine. Sometimes it is enough to trick strangers.

This is quite ambitious project that actually is useful and interesting. It is a Bluetooth remote control that enables to control PC applications like winamp while mowing around in your room. It has a Nokia LCD screen where you can see the winamp playlist and select desired song. It also allows to make Skype call.

So this is pretty solid thing to have. Let’s see a bit in to hardware. It is based on AT90USB1287 AVR microcontroller that has internal USB interface so no problem to have USB connectivity for firmware uploading via bootloader and charging Li-Ion battery. USB can also be recognized as external multimedia keyboard that allows same manipulation as it was remote. But the main fun thin is Bluetooth to UART module LMX9838 that also can have direct control of audio codec chip W681310. From PC side Bluetooth commands are processed by Winamp plugin that takes care of accepting commands and parsing it to remote control LCD.

If you deal with time in your embedded projects it is better to leave time keeping for RTC chip, because it is designed for this. In this project a Maxim Dallas DS1307 RTC chip with I2C is used. It can keep track of the clock/calendar including seconds, minutes, hours, day, date, month, and year information. Microcontroller only has to read this information when needed and devote all its resources for other tasks.

This project is more tutorial-like project as it includes several display options such as 2×16 LCD and via COM port where information can be seen in Hyper Terminal window. Material of this project is pretty complete – you will be able to build hardware and even to compile the project even if you are quite new to this.