Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!

Meet Cupcake, the 3D printer! Some of the guys at our local hackerspace pooled our money and bought one of these babies. Looking forward to seeing what it can do. I anticipate using it for one-off parts like enclosures, face plates, knobs and widgets, but who knows. Exciting!

Arduino + Bluetooth

My JY-MCU Arduino-compatible bluetooth module recently arrived, and I've had a chance to play with it for a bit. At $8.20 from DealExtreme in a package ready for mounting on a breadboard or connecting directly to the Arduino, this is a cheap and very simple way to add wireless connectivity to your Arduino project!

I've briefly tested it with the Amarino Toolkit too, and it works flawlessly.

Dead AA battery? Not necessarily!

One of my favourite websites, Hack A Day, has an interesting article about squeezing the last drop of juice out of an AA battery. Most of your AA using devices die when the battery voltage drops below a certain pre-set limit. With this circuit on your breadboard/project you can use those suckers until just 0.3 volts remain!

Programming an Atmega368

While it may not be a huge feat of engineering, I finally managed to program an Atmega368 microcontroller! Strapping the little 28 pin DIP bugger to a breadboard and using an Arduino Uno R3 to program it posed more challenges than I was prepared for.

After a lot of screwing around with auto-reset, desoldering a 16MHz crystal from an old PCI card to graft onto the monstrosity, I finally got it working. The picture shows the whole unholy mess blinking an LED for the first time. The ultimate fate of this particular microcontroller? It shall serve as the brains for my Pomodoro timer project. The final version. Yeah, I know. It's a learning experience!

Self-contained Monster LED

Hack-A-Day brings us this cool article on building a self-contained monster LED display using an ATiny85 to control it. Going to add this one to my ToDo list! Maybe not 16 digits but hey.