The ammo counter, the most ubiquitous and humble of FPS game elements, but completely absent from Nerf combat (apart from some transparent magazines). I decided to remedy this!

I've taken a Nerf Stampede (electric, fully automatic, clip-fed) and added an IR light gate to detect shots, broken out one of the clip insertion interlock switches to detect reloading, and added a display for the count, with an Arduino to act as the brains.

Robosapien was a toy robot released back in 2003. One of the neat things about these robots is that the manufacturer designed them for easy hackability.

This is about a Sunday afternoon spent attaching a Seeeduino (Arduino clone) and a Bluetooth serial module to the Robosapien, then remote controlling him from a Python shell. Read more »

Getting Started with the MHVBoard in the Arduino Environment

The MHVBoard will work within the Arduino environment.

The MHVBoard is a low cost Arduino clone, based off the Metaboard.

It offers a TTL serial port, USB programming, ICSP, breadboard compatible headers and hardware already set up for software USB via V-USB.

While the original Metaboard did not choose to issue a license, our revisions are licensed under TAPR Noncommercial Hardware License.

I have finally posted a video of my HT1632-AVR library in action. There's not a lot to the video but I am sick of trying to get Adobe Premiere to play nice with my (possibly lack of supported) CODECS.

I, like many people, was excited to learn of the Sure Electronics LED Matrix displays going for cheap on ebay. Sure' makes several different LED displays, the most common being the 0832; in red (DE-DP104) or green (DE-DP105) and the 2416; also in red (DE-DP016) or green (DE-DP017).

This is the story of why I wrote my HT1632-AVR library. If that's of interest to you; read on, if you're just after the code; it's in devdsp/HT1632-AVR on GitHub. Read more »

Introduction

H1632-AVR is my attempt at making an Arduino and generic AVR compatible library to interface with Hoktek's HT1632 LED driver IC; the main component in a number of LED matrix displays available from Sure Electronics. Here is the description of the HT1632 IC from the manufacturer: Read more »

I'm working on a simple lighting display for a friend's night club event. It's based on 9 Aerpro 'neon' under car lights and will be sequenced by an Arduino.

I've decided that this would be a good a time as any to design my own Arduino shield and to start having a serious attempt at using gEDA.

In order to minimize component count, stocked items in my junk box, and to improve efficiency as well as have software control of the power supply, I wanted to do away with inefficient, standalone linear regulators and instead use spare PWM pins on the microcontroller to generate voltages instead.

I have written a library which creates a simple feedback loop, where you specify the target voltage, and the microcontroller alters the PWM duty cycle to create the requested voltages.

I bought a couple of these displays from Sure Electronics (an Ebay vendor) for an upcoming project.

The displays each consist of 4 LED modules, each module consisting of 8x8 LED chips, each under its own plastic diffuser lens.