Collaborate Disseminate
We think it’s OK to admit that when someone puts a binary display on a project, it’s just a thinly veiled excuse to get more blinkenlights into the world. That …read more Continue reading Baffle the Normies with This Binary Thermometer
This year’s Hackaday Supercon, the first since 2019 thanks to the pandemic, was a very similar affair to those of the past. Almost every hardware-orientated hacker event has its own …read more Continue reading Supercon Badge Reads A “Punch” Card
This is no ordinary heart-shaped PCB pendant project! To us, it’s also symbol representing the striking amount of love that [SaltyPaws] has put into its design and documentation. He tells …read more Continue reading Heart-Shaped Heartwarming Valentine’s Day Pendant
You say you want to go to Mars, but the vanishingly thin atmosphere, the toxic and corrosive soil, the bitter cold, the deadly radiation that sleets down constantly, and the long, perilous journey that you probably won’t return from has turned you off a little. Fear not, because there’s still …read more
The Charliewatch by [Trammell Hudson] is one of those projects which is beautiful in both design and simplicity. After seeing [Travis Goodspeed]’s GoodWatch21 digital watch project based around a Texas Instruments MSP430-based SoC, [Trammell] decided that it’d be neat if it was more analog. This is accomplished using the CC430F5137IRGZR …read more
Continue reading Returning Digital Watches To the Analog Age: Enter The Charliewatch
Figuring out the maximum number of peripherals which can be sensed or controlled with a minimum number of IOs is a classic optimization trap with a lot of viable solutions. The easiest might be something like an i2c IO expander, which would give you N outputs for 4 wires (SDA, …read more
Continue reading Tucoplexing: A New Charliplex for Buttons and Switches
Most of us are aware that charlieplexing can drive a large number of LEDs from a relatively small number of I/O pins, but [David Johnson-Davies] demonstrates adding another dimension to that method to create individually controlled PWM outputs as well. His ATtiny85 has twelve LEDs, each with individually-set brightness levels, …read more
Continue reading Get Twelve Charlieplexed PWM Outputs From an ATtiny85
Numbers are hard enough in English, but [Sadale] decided to take things a step further by building a calculator that works in Toki Pona. The result is Ilo Nanpa, an awesome hardware calculator that works in this synthetic minimal language. This is a bit harder than you might think, because Toki Pona doesn’t have digits in the same way that Neo-Latin languages like English do. Instead, you combine smaller numbers to make bigger ones. One is Wan, Two is Tu, but three is Wan Tu (1+2). As you might expect, this makes dealing and representing larger numbers somewhat complicated.
Ilo …read more
Continue reading Building And Controlling 19 LEDs & Five Buttons From Five Outputs
In your living room, the big display is what you want. But in an embedded project, often less is more. We think [bobricius] will agree since he submitted a tiny 4×5 LED display into our square inch challenge. The board features an ATtiny CPU and twenty SMD LEDs in a nice grid. You can see them in action, scrolling to some disco music in the video below.
There is plenty of room left in the CPU for bigger text strings — the flash memory is just over 10% full. A little side-mounted header makes it easy to program the chip …read more
Continue reading Less is More: A Micromatrix Display in a Square Inch
What makes a game a game? Like, how do we know that we’re looking at a variation of PONG when confronted with one? And how do we know how to play it? [Bertho] sought to answer this question as he designed what is probably the smallest-ever 1-D PONG game. His answer involves charlieplexing LEDs, using a voltage divider to save I/O pins, and a couple of AAAs that should last for a long, long time.
[Bertho]’s Minimum 1-D PONG, or m1dp for short, puts an ATTiny85 through its paces as gameplay quickly progresses from ‘I got this’ to ‘no one …read more