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.
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.
For our “Designing With Microcontrollers” class at Cornell University, we built a pinball machine with electronic components controlled by software on a PIC32 microcontroller. This article details the design process, challenges we experienced, and solutions we came up with while completing the project from start to finish.
Twenty years ago, I published an article in Nuts & Volts about designing a general-purpose programming system: the LP120. I’ve used the LP120 heavily for the last 20 years to support my eight-bit design hobby. It now has uploadable drivers and programming modules for many eight-bit micros, EPROMs, and GALs. However, things have changed since 2000. Back then, few microcontrollers had more than 4K bytes of program memory. Now, eight-bit PICs have up to 64K words of memory. Clearly an update to the LP120 was called for.
Long exposure photography captures the path of light over time, smearing moving elements to produce a single photo which creates a new realm of artistic photography. However, popular subjects of light exposure photographs are uncontrollable (stars, car headlights, etc.), so we made a light painter using microcontrollers and a DotStar LED strip to develop custom photography from images uploaded by a user.
As a final class project for our “Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers” course we all took last semester at Cornell University, we created a very unique device. We wanted to design something fun, aesthetically pleasing, and interactive, and since we all enjoy listening to music, we decided on a music visualizer. Our vision was to create a unit that listens to music being played, then in real time displays a dynamic and colorful visual representation of the music based on the volume and pitch of the notes. Additionally, our music visualizer provides an alternate avenue for experiencing music for the hearing impaired. Here’s how we did it, so you can make one too!
This project implements a clock/timer device with several handy features other than just a simple alarm. It utilizes a 16-bit PIC, the MPLab Code Configurator, and a serial LCD.
