When I was on TI's website today checking out the MSP430 microcontroller series chips, I also discovered another cool product they have. It's a wristwatch with built-in RF transceiver based on their one family of microcontrollers (CC430 RF SoC Series). It is called the EZ430-Chronos. This is full featured sports watch with time keeping, 3-axis accelerometer, pressure sensor and temperature sensor. The watch can easily communicate with other wireless sensors around it that are transmitting in the same frequency. The watch kit comes with two USB interface module. One for wireless connection to the watch to set time etc. or collect accelerometer and other sensor data on the pc. The other interface is to reprogram the watch if you want. The kit also comes with tools to disassemble the watch for reprogramming. There is a wiki page for more information at:
http://www.ti.com/chronoswiki

I believe it will be definite attraction for techsavy people out there.

Today I bumped into TI's website about their recently released embedded development kit targeted towards hobbyists. It is called the LaunchPad. The kit is priced at only $4.30 and TI's store will ship it free if ordered from there. You can also order it from their distribution partners, but with shipping cost. However, one of the distribution partner, Arrow Electronics is offering free shipping till the end of July for any orders. So you can order it there as well for free shipping. Here are the few features of the microcontrollers that comes with the kit.

Features

• Low Supply Voltage Range 1.8 V to 3.6 V
• Ultralow Power Consumption
  • Active Mode: 220 µA at 1 MHz, 2.2 V
  • Standby Mode: 0.5 µA
  • Off Mode (RAM Retention): 0.1 µA
• Five Power-Saving Modes
• Ultrafast Wake-Up From Standby Mode in Less Than 1 µs
• 16-Bit RISC Architecture, 62.5 ns Instruction Cycle Time
• Basic Clock Module Configurations:
  • Internal Frequencies up to 16 MHz With One Calibrated Frequency
  • Internal Very Low Power LF Oscillator
  • 32-kHz Crystal
  • External Digital Clock Source
• 16-Bit Timer_A With Two Capture/Compare Registers
• Universal Serial Interface (USI) Supporting SPI and I2C (See Table 1)
• Brownout Detector
• 10-Bit 200-ksps A/D Converter With Internal Reference, Sample-and-Hold,
  and Autoscan (See Table 1)
• Serial Onboard Programming, No External Programming Voltage Needed
  Programmable Code Protection by Security Fuse
• On-Chip Emulation Logic With Spy-Bi-Wire Interface

The kit comes with the followings:

LaunchPad Development board (MSP-EXP430G2)

Mini USB cable

2x MSP430 flash devices

• MSP430G2211IN14 flash device
• MSP430G2231IN14 flash device (preloaded with sample program)

10-pin PCB Connectors (2 male & 2 female)

32kHz crystal

Quick Start Guide

2x LaunchPad stickers

I believe it will be quite popular in the hobbiest community for the low price of the microcontrollers (around $2.17 for retail) and low power usage of the chips. I saw a demo video where they were powering up the microcontroller and a LCD display using only 3 pieces of grapes, potatos, kiwis etc.

For more information please visit their wiki site at: http://www.ti.com/launchpadwiki

This is a experiment with arduino and nokia 3310 display module. I downloaded the library from http://www.nuelectronics.com/estore/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=12. I got the display modules from eBay and made my own simple breakout board. This demo shows the time reading from a DS1307 time keeping chip. Also demonstrates how to display a graphic image and animation on the display using the library.

Here is how it looks:

Here is a video clip:

 

Here is the arduino sketch:

Nokia3310_Clock.pde (5.80 kb)

pacman.h (5.87 kb)

I recently wrote some code to drive a 4 digit seven segment display using the arduino and 74HC595 shift register chip. The display is a seven segment common anode display with decimal dots. The pin configuration can be found here. I have connected a DS18S20 temparature sensor to read the temparature and display the reading on the seven segment display.

Here is how it looks:

Here is the arduino sketch:

Download the sketch from the link below: 

SevenSegmentTest.pde (2.27 kb)

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me via the contact link.

I have been working on this for a while and finally it has been perfected. Here the arduino reads data from DS1307 RTC chip using I2C protocol and displays the time in english and bengali digits on a dot matrix display. The dot matrix display is connected to the arduino through 74HC595 shift register chips to expand the I/O pins of arduino. Here is how the prototype looks:

Photos:





Video:

Arduino Real Time Clock using I2C and Dot Matrix Display from Pial on Vimeo.