Do you remember yourself sitting by one of these arcade machines and playing games like Space Invaders? Well these were really popular before PC’s took over. But still they are available in many public areas and seem to be popular. Put a coin and get ready. I see one major advantage of arcade machines – they are designed to be convenient to play with few handy controls and big screen in front of you.

But don’t get too comfortable because arcade machine may be very tiny so you can step on it without noticing. Actually this project tries to mimic real arcade machine. It is built around AVR Atmega328p microcontroller and 1.5 inch OLED display. Machine runs on RTOS so called FunkOS that is specially designed for low resource microcontrollers. Currently mini arcade machine allows playing Tetris, Space Invaders and Breakout. Keep eyes on it there is more to come.

Why would you need a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer? Well maybe for fun, maybe for viewing what signals surrounds you. And you know there is a huge number of 2.4GHz transmitters around you starting with Bluetooth, WiFi, Zigbee, Wireless USB and other short distance wireless devices. In urban area the channels are overcrowded with these signals and sometimes trying to switch another one may be tricky because some particular channel is busy. This way your communication may fail or at least work erroneously.

So here you might need a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer to see what channels dominate. When speaking of 2.4GHz this doesn’t mean that your device works at exact frequency – 2.4GHz legally can vary in 80MHz limits starting at 2.4GHz. This particular analyzer uses a CYWM6935 module that talks to Atmega8 via SPI interface and scans frequencies from 2.4GHz to 2.483GHz with 1MHz step increment. To make things handy ant practical, all construction was placed in to old Nokia 3410 case with same LCD. As it is battery operated, there is no problem to take to any place and see if you need to change, let’s say, WiFi channel for better performance.

Do you like to play guitar? If yes, then probably you know that a significant time is spent when tuning instrument in order to play fluently. To tune a guitar you can depend on your ears or use a tuning device, or simply build one that is different from others.

As you know most of tuners use a microphone or other part to acquire sound frequency that is compared to a reference frequency. This way you know whether to strain or lose string. This particular device is interesting somehow, because it doesn’t use any microphones but couple LEDs. It is based on stroboscopic effect. Two LEDs are aligned side by side and are blinking at a frequency that string has to be tuned. When string vibrates, the two lines appear on fixed positions. If LED and string frequencies don’t match – lines appear to be blinking, or moving. The whole process is to tune string frequency until lines appear to be at fixed positions and not blinking. Stimmmopped is based on battery powered Atmega8 microcontroller with 7 segment LED indicator, two LEDs and couple buttons.

If you are a cat lower then probably it is more pleasure to feed it by yourself. Otherwise if there still a cat in your house and needs to be fed, then leave this job for automated cat feeder that is controlled by ATmega8 microcontroller.

The concept is pretty obvious – microcontroller counts time, that is shown in LCD screen along with next feed time. There are couple buttons to adjust the feed time settings. When feed time occurs servo motor opens food dispenser that pours food in to a bowl. I bet cat loves this toy and thinks how to hack it to serve food more often : )

Tetris is being popular for years. Probably everyone has tried it and found it catchy and involving. But for someone it is more fun to build a Tetris game instead of playing it. Meet the AVR ATmega168 based Tetris game that works with standard KS0108 graphical LCD 128×64 and even Nokia 3595 screen.

Game hardware is really simple and easy to build … or any dev board can be used – just make sure all necessary pins are available to run GLCD and five buttons. Project is located here.