There are times when you want to record one or another phone conversation so later could listen again. Don’t know if this is necessary to do, but if so, here is a standalone phone conversation recorder project based on PIC microcontroller. Device is powered from USB and actually sends voice data to computer where software compresses audio to MP3 format for compact storing.

Device automatically detects when phone is picked up so could start recording automatically and stops recording when phone is hanged. Read more »

Digital effects are cool addition to electric guitar. In this project made by colin353 effects pedal is based mainly based on recording guitar sound to RAM and the mixing or doing other manipulations with real signal on the output via op amp.

Of course PIC16F877 has not enough ram to do recordings of sound that comes from ADC, so external 23k256 of RAM is used that gives enough of memory to do recordings for special effect modes like “loop”, “burst”, “kill” and “bypassed”. As author says, once hardware is ready, there is free highway to do software modifications for including such effects as delay or echo.

Regular clocks sometimes seem to be boring. So why not to build something interesting and catchy? All you need is a PIC18F2520 microcontroller and Graphical LCD. Andrew has made this funky Pong clock that uses some action along with time display.

As you may know PIC18F2520 has a RTC clock built in, all you need to attach external 32.768kHz crystal. This way it is possible to do precise time calculation while microcontroller running at 8 MHz speed can control graphical LDC functions. As final result you can see a simple pong game play that seems is timed to seconds matter and in the middle of GLCD screen time is displayed.

Would you love having a robot buzzing around your house and playing music with couple drumsticks on any obstacle?

The robot itself is a four wheel cart with IR sensor that detects various obstacles. The fun part is that it is equipped with couple drumsticks attached to couple of servo motors. Once robot founds an object it starts drumming on them. The robot is still in deep construction, but it already can show what’s it capable of. Looks fun, isn’t it?

Probably logic analyzer isn’t a “must have“tool for most hobbyists. You won’t need it probably at all if you are dealing with simple projects. But if one day you will miss it – don’t rush to buy one. Build one!

If you have a scope on a table – let it do the job. All you need is to build a simple PIC18F26K20 based circuit that takes 4 or 8 logic inputs and converts them to oscilloscope signal. Logic analyzer uses one scope channel and TRIGGER input for triggering display.