Month: June 2009

Peggy2 is an electronic peg board with a matrix of 25×25 LEDs. Peggy2 was designed by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and kits are available on their store site. I built a peggy2 earlier this year and have been tinkering with it.

Peggy2 is Arduino compatible as it’s run by an ATMega168 (or 328p) microcontroller. One of the first projects I worked on was a simple message board program called peggyboard. This program lets you write and save a message using the navigation buttons. The characters are 3×5 pixels each allowing for 6×4 characters on the board. The message is stored in EEPROM so it can be re-displayed when you turn the peggy back on.

Here is the Arduino sketch for Peggyboard. You also need the Peggy2 library installed in order to compile the sketch.

ClockIt is a pretty simple microcontroller (ATMega168) based LED clock from SparkFun electronics. My partner and I put one of these together at Maker Faire a few weeks ago. It was a fun little project to solder together and only took about 15 minutes to build.

When we got it home I set it up in the kitchen next to Julia Child (an iMac). A few days later J was complaining that the clock buzzed quietly while running and that the buzzing changed pitch each second as the ‘:’ between the hours and minutes flashed on and off. I had also noticed when setting the time, the up and down buttons would alter the time by 5 or 10 minutes if you had previously held the button down to scroll the time faster.

Fortunately as SparkFun posted the source code for ClockIt on their website, I was able to tweak it to address both problems. I made a few small changes that keep the buzzing (noise picked up by the piezo speaker) at a constant pitch making it far less annoying. I also fixed the up/down button behavior while setting the time. The modified code is available here or on SparkFun’s forum.

Greetings. This is a new blog so I can go on about various projects I’ve been working on. I’ve recently been mucking around with arduino’s and associated hardware. I’ll start off by posting about some of the things I’ve built (either from kits or otherwise).