This idea got its start after reading the article by Matt Newman VA3MGN in the January 2023 issue of QST, “Switch Selection of Powerpole Ports.” Combining his concept with the use of a Nextion touch display seemed like a nice upgrade.
Building a toaster oven temperature profile controller might not sound so exciting, but that's just the first layer of the onion! The exact same hardware and software can be used to build all sorts of embedded microcontroller projects, and you can do so without ever installing a software development environment anywhere because it's all inside the microcontroller itself. This is all based on relatively new technology called "WebUSB" and "Web Serial."
This is a story of a nostalgic, useless, but fun project. What we have here is a COSMAC VIP emulator that runs on a single chip (PIC18F4550 MCU) with minimal hardware.
Are you ready for some serious Rock, Paper, Scissors competition? This game is not just for kids. In fact, the World RPS Association in Canada holds big tournaments every year. Now you can build your own Rock, Paper, Scissors Electrified game that keeps score as you bang away on the huge arcade buttons.
While brainstorming project ideas for our microcontroller class at Cornell University, we realized that we all particularly missed visiting amusement parks during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, we decided to build something that would bring some of the excitement of those parks into the lab. In particular, we thought that using LEDs on a LED strip would be a creative and exciting way to visually simulate different rides.
I bought a Smith-Corona PWP 78DS typewriter from Good Will for under $20. The daisy wheel print quality was perfect, and it included a self-contained word processor. However, there was no way to use it as a printer. I decided to emulate a membrane keyboard with an Arduino Nano Every, so that either an added serial port or the existing keyboard could input text.
Multimeters are a wonderful and easy-to-use tool to accurately quantify the incoming AC voltage from a pure sine wave output power supply. Barring a few high-end hybrid models, not all are capable of plotting the trend of this quantity over a limited time period, like an oscilloscope. So, I decided to build a voltage monitoring system with RTOS.
