Cool Arduino projects

June 17, 2008 in Electronics, Hardware
Tags: arduino, atmega, atmel, door, flickr, hack, Hardware, interface, lcd, lock, nunchuck, rgb, Wii

Lots of Arduino based projects seem to be appearing on my reading list recently, especially from Hackaday. I used to be quite interested in PIC Microcontrollers but I was put off a bit because you could only really program them with ASM, unless you payed for an expensive C compiler.

The Arduino is based on the Atmel ATmega microcontroller, and consists of a board containing the microcontroller as well as some basic auxiliary hardware for programming the chip. There is a simple development environment avaiable, which appears to use C.

Here are a few cool projects I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks.

• 3 Wire Interface for HD4470 LCD Displays
  A few years ago I made a clock using one of these displays, which was controlled by the parallel port of an old NetBSD machine I had lying around. I know it was possible to control them using 4 data lines and a couple of control lines, 3 is insane!
• RGB Combination Door Lock
  Imaginative variant on the common combination door lock, using colors instead of numbers.
• Nokia Color LCD Frame
  More LCD fun – this time using a color Nokia LCD to display items from a Flickr feed.
• Reading Wii Nunchuck Data
  A guide showing how to read data from a Wii Nunchuck into the Arduino – possible applications for this: Robot controllers, camera pan/tilt controllers, general awesomeness.

If I can find some spare time and money, I might buy one and have a go at a project of my own :)

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