Bluebie is developing µBoot, a tiny USB bootloader that only consumes 2.1 Kilobytes of flash on an ATtiny85. It’s based on USBaspLoader-tiny85 bootloader but loses ~0.7KB by customizing it’s functionality. µBoot is a tiny bootloader for attiny85 chips. Weighing in at just under 2.1kb it leaves more free space to uploaded programs than any other […]
Category Archives: AVR
Power a microcontroller with frickin laser beams
A cheap laser pointer shining into an LED can create small voltages, the photovoltaic effect. Wardy uses it to power an ultra low power ATTiny5 microcontroller: I may have raised an eyebrow slightly to see 2.50V appear on the screen. Hmmmmmm. I had been expecting something like 0.25V or something in that region, based on […]
ATTiny44 controlled Hatsune Miku animated techno leekspin
Scott Harden produced this project a while back and decided to pull it out of the archives and send it in. Its a mock up of a Hatsune Miku character singing a techno version of the leekspin song (hence the leek in the character’s right hand.) “The goal was to create a minature Miku which […]
Adding RS-232 DTR signal output to an AVR running the avr-cdc USB library
Cmdrk33n hacked the avr-cdc library to add the RS232 DTR signal output to one of the pins on his ATtiny MCU. Only a few lines of code need to be changed to implement his solution. Demonstrated in the above video is the DTR signal turning the LED on whenever a terminal window (connection) is opened. […]
AVR based intelligent temperature monitoring and control system
Shawon designed, and built an AVR based intelligent temperature monitoring and control system. He documented both the hardware, and the firmware on his blog, with in depth descriptions on how everything works. Controlling temperature has been a prime objective in various applications including refrigerators, air conditioners, air coolers, heaters, industrial temperature conditioning and so on. Temperature […]
Artemis music synthesizer
Chris Woodall writes: “I just finished my writeup for my Music Synthesizer kit project. The kit was made for a soldering workshop for the Boston University Artemis Project, which is a Women In Technology Summer Program for rising high school freshmen. I work for the BU EDF which normally makes electronics for physics experiments, but […]
AVR based USB website hit counter
AVR based USB website hit counter, displays the hit count on a 8 digit 7-segment display. This is a USB Physical Hit Counter. This version requires one MCU to communicate between PC and 7-segments display driver.I decided using AVR microcontroller and this is my first AVR project.The purpose of this project still same as previous […]
Little Wire beta V1.1 firmware and software released
Kehribar released the v1.1 beta firmware and software for the Little Wire AVR multi-tool. He added support for the 1-wire protocol, made the I2C, SPI, and the AVR debug console interfaces more robust. Other features include new 3 channel pulse-width modulator, software controlled internal pullup resistors, andPIC24F series programming capability.
ATTiny2313 controlling a HD44780 LCD via AVR-GCC
We came across Scott Harden’s brief article describing how to control an HD44780 LCD using an Attiny2313. After a number of unsuccessful attempts with other code he found this LCD library written by Martin Thomas for use with AVR-GCC. With a few mods to the code Scott produced the above results controlling his 2×20 LCD […]
GPS packed in a mint tin case
Jeremy built a tiny GPS receiver into a “Altoids” case. This unit is explained in the video above, but is basically a GPS receiver, 1 CR1220 battery for the RTC on the GPS breakout, one of my Square Inch of Goodness boards, one 128×32 OLED display, three 6mm buttons, and a 400mAh Li-Po Battery (from […]
Video player using Nokia color LCD and 8 bit AVR
Vinod S. writes about his latest project, a video player using a Nokia color LCD, ATmega32 and SD card. “I am introducing my new video player made using an ATmega32 microcontroller and Nokia color LCD. I got a 65K color LCD from an old Nokia 6030 mobile phone. I directly soldered 10 thin enameled copper […]
Guess what it is and get a free PCB of it
Matseng made a contest in the forum. If you guess what the PCB is, he’ll send one over. This PCB is exactly the same size as a credit card and have the XMega, a Lipo battery and charger, a MicroUSB for comms and charging, a buttload of tactle switches and a bunch of 7-segment displays […]
AVR LCD name badge using ATtiny 2313
Erik Gregg (Hank) wanted a name badge using an 16×2 alphanumeric display for use at conferences, nerdfests, etc. He constructed this simple ATtiny2313 based badge which interfaces with the LCD with a minimum of components. This project is based upon this Instructable. He took the Instructable to the next level by moving from breadboard to […]
AVR performance monitoring using the Open Bench Logic Sniffer
Alan wanted to check out just how much performance he could squeeze out of the ATMega328P. He needed was a way to measure the amount of time the CPU actually uses while executing various tasks. Using the Logic Sniffer to read a pin, that he toggles ON when the CPU is executing a task, and […]
Little-Wire entered production at Seeed Studios
The Little-Wire, TinyAVR based multi-tool has entered production at Seeed Studios. After some initial difficulties with production setup, the first run of Little Wires has started production last week. Last Friday they said me that they’ll start the production immediately at that day. I’m waiting … I hope at most at the end of this […]
Capacitive touch sensing with a single ADC pin
Capacitive sense buttons and pads are awesome, but many of the available systems are either propitiatory or require a dedicated IC. Toumas decided to code his own based on a closed source Atmel example where a single ADC pin is used for capacitive sensing. He reverse engineered it, and documented his results: I’ve been thinking […]
AVR emulating ARM Cortex M0
First, an AVR that boots Linux. Now a Cortex M0 emulator for the ATtiny: I like writing emulators. Since my last one (ARM emulator that booted linux), I was wondering how much faster one could emulate an ARM cpu on an atmega device. The C-language core netted 10KHz. This time I decided to reduce the […]
2boots: Arduino/AVR serial and SD card bootloader
Martin tipped us off to an AVR/Arduino serial and mmc/SD card bootlaoder. It was designed to fit the same 2kb memory area that the usual Arduino booloader fits into, but can load firmware from an SD card too. Very useful for on “in the field” programing. This is a proof-of-concept dual bootloader for Atmel AVR […]
Running Linux on a 8bit AVR
A common assumption is that you need a 32bit processor and lots of RAM to even consider running Linux, but Dimitry pulled it off with just an 8bit AVR. It is common to see newbies asking in microcontroller forums if they can run Linux on their puny little 8-bit micro. The results are usually laughter. […]
Atmel University Program Kicks Off 2012 Robotics Contest
The 2012 Atmel Robotics Contest (ARC) is currently underway. The contest is open to university students 18 years or older in North America, South America and Europe, and the goal is to develop a battery-powered 3D version of the Atmel robot ‘Mel’ (pictured above) using Arduino’s 4WD platform (for example, see Seeedstudio’s version) and Atmel […]