Would you like to get rid of multiple remote controls at home? Why buy one if you have some brain. As housing an old Nintendo GameBoy could be perfect choice where you already have buttons and Graphical LCD in place.

Only simple add-on made of IR transceiver and ATtiny44 has to be attached to GameBoy port that converts received IR data in to serial that can be sent (and received) to GameBoy Advance. Adapter is compatible with all 38 and 36KHz devices. Remote signals can be sampled directly from original remote controls and recorded in memory. Then commands can be sent via nice Graphical interface. Is it convenient enough – you decide…

For this project you need a light tower with red, yellow, green and blue color lamps and Wavecom GSM module. All this stuff can be bought on ebay if needed. Anyway this is a great project to make cool effects by switching lights remotely by sending simple SMS.

Light bulbs are controlled via Opto22 board with 12V optical switches that allow controlling of 12V bulbs safely. Relay board and SMS terminal is controlled by obsolete AT90S2313 microcontroller board that can be easily replaced by ATtiny2313.

What is good about WiFi radio? Actually it removes the limits of location. You can listen to the radio channels from around the world in pretty high quality. Regular radio is limited to some range from transmitter antenna, this way you can hear mostly local broadcasts. Internet radio isn’t new thing – even wireless radio boxes have been around for a while. You can easily get one for less than $100.

If you are a little bit geeky just build one. In this project various parts from different electronics are used like WL-520gu router, USB audio adapter, VFD display and ATmega8 which ties things together. When put everything in nice black box – it seems that you couldn’t get better looking from store.

This idea might seem a bit crazy, but it’s real. Matthew have built a bidirectional serial terminal with standard PS/2 keyboard input and 54×24 resolution oscilloscope screen. Adapter is built around ATmega168 microcontroller that reads keyboard commands, intake UART communications and generates video signal sent to scope.

As a result you can see a 7-bit ASCII and 60Hz refreshing image in oscilloscope screen. The terminal works like professional one with most features available including graphical configuration menu, selectable baud rate and configuration profiles. Despite the simplicity of hardware, it is a time critical application. For resolution of 54×24 characters AVR has to be clocked at 20MHz. After all, the result looks great. Author even managed to connect a Linux box to its Terminalscope.

Could you count how many passwords and usernames you have to remember? All these social networks, bank accounts, emails – it is easy to forget. Writing in paper and keeping them isn’t best idea. So you might need a password managing system that could securely keep track of all your passwords and usernames without worries to loose or forget.

The whole project is built around Atmel AVR ATmega168 microcontroller that is also equipped with LCD display and keypad. The device plugs to PC via USB port that is driven by software. The passwords are stored into Java Card smart card which is considered safe from cracking. The idea of USB interface is to emulate username and password keystrokes so like user would type them physically.