IXR uMonday's for Monday Aug 6

IXR's Monday night Microcontroller madness @ InfoAge in Wall Township, (just off Rt 18, exit 7 or 7A), 7 PM,get your maker on! ;-)

So Starting @ 7 PM, IXR will have it's weekly Microcontroller Mondays. the last few weeks have been fun. I started out with no projects and now I can't keep up with them. :-). The first project I worked on was figuring out how to connect an Arduino to some rather odd LED displays we have (M8647AHR). It's a pair of 2 segment LED displays (plus dp) that takes 36 bits shifted into it to display the characters. We have 16 pairs of these. So far I've setup 2 pairs and I'm demonstrating a simple count down timer. To drive all 16 I'll need some additional electronics such as a 4 to 16 demux (74LS154) and a buffer chip.

I also want to spend a few minutes taking apart an LED display IXR has. There's a RJ45 port on the back and no mention of it in the manual. I suspect a communications port but I'm not sure. A little time dismantling it with help give up its secrets and if not, it won't be much more difficult to figure out it works (reverse engineer) and to burn a new EPROM to make it do what I intend. :-)

Finally there will be the most important thing to work on! The 3D printer. Monty proposed building a couple of 3D printers so I decided it would be a good idea. We have the motors (10 of them, 5 for each printer) and the driving electrons. I really wanted to spend some time putting them together but found no spare time during the week (argh!).

I'm also going to attempt to start a few project boxes. The idea being that if you have nothing else to do you can try working on a project box. My first one is the Internet clock radio. I have some digital AM/FM chips coming in, a Raspberry PI (running Debian Linux) and an AM/FM Alarm Clock Radio. I do intend on working on it but at the moment it's not at the top of the project list.

As a bonus Martin has given me a challenge, to build a control head for a Micom 2E radio. This looks like an intersting project. And he has some need of some X10 wireless protocol devices. Let's see where that leads us.

As always, I have more ideas than time but with ISXr's help I'll start tackling some of these projects. :-)