Outroot and things

Electronics, programming, computers, and geek stuff by Kevin Darlington

Nokia 6100 LCD run­ning on a minibully

I recently bought a Nokia 6100 LCD from Ebay because I am in an LCD craze phase. Since I have no need for this LCD right now, I decided to port some code over to the PIC24H minibully from Spark­fun. (more…)

Clock pro­to­type

I’ve been want­ing to make my own alarm clock for some time now, since I’m unsat­is­fied with any alarm clock on the mar­ket (neglect­ing over­priced ones). I just made a quick pro­to­type to see if I liked it or not.

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STM32 with 4-bit LCD

Here is a 4-bit LCD library for the STM32 that I based off of the LCD4BitLibrary for Arduino. It’s light­weight, but it also incor­po­rates Arduino’s Print class.

http://github.com/outroot/STM32-LCD-4Bit

STM32 HD Project template

Here is a STM32 project tem­plate that I based off of http://www.micromouseonline.com/blog/2009/10/19/another-stm32-project-template.

I made some changes to it to get it work­ing for my pur­poses and the CodeS­ourcery G++ lite (EABI) compiler.

http://github.com/outroot/STM32-HD-Project-template

San­guino

I decided to use a San­guino for my next project and I noticed that every time I reset it with the push­but­ton, it would take around 10 sec­onds to start the pro­gram. I thought this was absurd since the reg­u­lar Arduino doesn’t take that long. I decided to dive into the boot­loader firmware and find out the prob­lem. The San­guino ver­sion I’m deal­ing with is v1.4 r1.

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Repur­posed tv-b-gone

At church, we have a pro­jec­tor that is close to the ceil­ing and far away from the audio/video booth. The remote con­trol that came with the pro­jec­tor does not have a very far range. I have to get out of the booth and walk close to the back row and keep mov­ing the remote until I get the pro­jec­tor to turn off or on. It wasn’t only annoy­ing for me, but I’m sure it was dis­tract­ing for the church members.

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8x8 Heart

I decided this year to make a 8x8 RGB LED device to give to my girl­friend for Valentine’s Day. I had made her a heart of red LEDs two years ago and I decided to step it up a lit­tle. No, this was not a cheap solu­tion (it cost around $100 in mate­ri­als, includ­ing all the stuff I bought that I ended up not using). I spent more time on this thing than any­thing I have made before.

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Air­wick PIR

I’ve obtained two Air­wick Fresh­mat­ics from a yard sale for $2. These were used in my house for a while, but it quickly became annoy­ing to be sprayed in the face every time.  So I decided to hook it up to my arduino for no rea­son whatsoever.

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Boduino

At church, we have a pro­jec­tor device that is hooked up to the com­puter that allows us to show words to a song or a video. The prob­lem is the VGA to com­pos­ite con­verter we have does not have a but­ton to black out the pro­jec­tor. So, when I go to get a video ready to be shown, the whole con­gre­ga­tion sees what I’m doing.

My solu­tion was to take an arduino and build a device that would sit in the mid­dle of the con­verter and pro­jec­tor, and allow me to black out the pro­jec­tor with a push but­ton. There are sev­eral other solu­tions to this prob­lem, but this seemed like the most fun. The project was named Boduino because it is a Black­Out arDUINO.

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