atmega128 – PocketMagic

Portable Environmental Monitor

August 12, 2015

The portable environmental monitor addresses pollution, the kind that we are unable to see but directly affects our health and causes life threatening diseases. Airborne toxic chemicals, radioactive dust and radioactive radon are correlated with cases of pulmonary cancer. Since our biological senses can do little to warn us of such possible dangers, the plan was to design the Portable environmental monitor as a first line detection and warning system….

MiCS-VZ-89 Air Quality Sensor

July 31, 2015

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The MiCS-VZ-89 Air Quality Sensor can detect carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds. This article shows how to access its readings via I2C.

Sharp GP2Y1010 dust sensor

July 31, 2015

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The Sharp GP2Y10 dust sensor can detect dust in air using the reflected infrared light, including very fine smoke particles. See how to use it with a microcontroller.

ILI9341 touchscreen LCD Library

July 23, 2015

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I got a few QVGA LCD’s with resistive touchscreen for an ongoing project. All that was left to do was putting the driver code together. The LCD code part was very much similar to my previous work on the ILI9163 but this time I went for faster SPI communication (also due to the bigger resolution). The microcontroller – an Atmega128 – uses normal SPI transfer and the external quartz crystal…

Atmega128 Voodoo

February 9, 2015

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Apparently I had no better inspiration on how to name this post. It all started with a nice sunny day, when I was in great shape for doing creative work. My plan was to do some research on the following uRADMonitor models B/C, to put everything together and start the design of the new device. With all the extra new features, it was clear I needed a microcontroller upgrade, from…

DIY AVR Development Board with Atmega128

February 7, 2015

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Eagle diagrams and instructions for building a DIY Development board featuring the powerful Atmega128 microcontroller

AVR SDCard FAT support with FatFS

August 2, 2013

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You’ve probably seen or done lots of cool microcontroller projects already, but did you ever consider adding permanent data storage to your projects? I did, and there are numerous advantages: saving data from sensors (data logger), saving configuration files, reading external content like images or songs, and so on! One thing is to connect an SD Card to an AVR microcontroller via SPI (relatively easy), a completely different thing is…

Using FS1000A/XY-FST RF Radio module with AVRs

July 31, 2013

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Wireless data transfer can be useful for a variety of projects. I stumbled upon a very low cost emitter+receiver modules pair, and planned to use it for some time now. There are a few variants available on the market, but they do quite the same thing, just the operating frequency might be different (315MHz / 418MHz / 433MHz/ 915MHz): The emitter usually has 3 pins (VCC->5V, GND, DATA), with a…

How to set the AVR Fusebits

March 11, 2013

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Learn how to set your atmega to work with various external crystals, program the fusebits, and build a fusebit doctor to revive your AVRs, in case you wrote the wrong settings .

NMEA GPS Library for AVR Microcontrollers

February 25, 2013

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An open source library that allows you to use a NMEA GPS Module with an AVR Microcontroller. UART Communication and NMEA Parser is included.

ATMega128 and HD44780 LCD using 3 Wires with the 74HC164

February 21, 2013

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Learn how to transform your HD44780 LCD into a easy to use, serial LCD, that you can connect to your microcontroller using only 3 wires! It’s time to save a few pins, and expand your project’s functionality!

Building a robot – Make the robot follow you

February 7, 2013

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Building an autonomous robot using a rover platform and advanced electronics is not an easy job. Kevin asked me to build a robot that would follow its user. A companion, very much like a robo-dog. See the project log here.