It’s been a tradition to check on new projects from Cornell University ECE 4760 Engineering class. They build cool AVR based projects each year and seems that they are getting more and more advanced. During the last 5 weeks of the semester in ECE 4760, Microcontroller Design, students had to combine sensors, actuators, microcontrollers, and [...]

Probably you’ve noticed, that scienceprog.com was down for a while. We have faced some technical issues that are fixed now. Right now seems that all functionality is restored and working properly. If you notice something wrong going on, just drop us a note. We are sorry for inconveniences. And hope you’ll stay with us.
Admin

If you have to spending endless times to start prototyping with an AVR ATtiny, then you can make it becoming easier. Yep, all you need to do is build the headers that can carry the 8 and 20 pin chips, where it can be plugged directly into breadboards.
Technically, these controller boards are building to provide [...]

Guys from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have released 2nd version of their Peggy LED display kit. It is a 25×25 LED display board which is capable to display various LED effects, output text and even animation with individual LED addressing.

WPvideo 1.10

Download!

This is quite smart construction allowing to drive any number of LEDs (from one to [...]

Probably this programmer cable can be found on every AVR fan website. It very simple and easy to build. You just need few passive components that can be packed inside LPT connector. From my perspective I wouldn’t recommend using this one programmer if you are more serious in microcontroller projects, because it has poor computer [...]

Probably most proper microcontroller programming method is using a bootloader program. Because you don’t need any special programming adapters or special knowledge – you just need to connect standard cable from your PC to target board and run special program on PC which communicates with MCU bootloader program. The idea is simple:

If microcontroller is preconfigured [...]

Open source rocks isn’t it? Here is a new WinAVR 20080411 release available for download. As always new release has lots of tweaks, bug fixes and optimizations. There are new XMEGA series microcontrollers preliminary included in supported device list. So we may have a chance to put hands on these new cool AVR microcontrollers. Here [...]

Finally second and improved AVR DDS signal generator is here. First AVR DDS V1.0 generator was only an attempt of running DDS algorithm without any amplitude control. This time I still wanted to keep things simple like minimum count of widely accessible components circuit, single sided PCB that comes together with good functionality.

AVR DDS [...]

It seems that ATMEL do not want to limit the AVR branch with 20MIPS AVR microcontrollers. Recently they introduced new AVR microcontroller family – XMEGA – which is still based on AVR core but has a higher performance along with low power feature. AVR microcontrollers are really optimal where high performance is needed with relatively [...]

If you go to AVR site and open an AVR application note AVR053 you will notice that there are different RC oscillators installed in to AVR chips during history. In table you can see tunable oscillator versions and their features.

Simply speaking each new version of oscillator introduces better features and improvements. But is it really [...]