Sunrise lamp add-on for nixie alarm clock.

IMG_0848Finnish winter days are dark and cold. The sun rises only for short moment, and even then it is often cloudy, or the sun is so low that it can rarely be seen. A circadian clock is synchronized with daylight changes, and so without external stimulus from sunlight, my daily rhythm started to lag and spin around. Waking at morning was difficult task.

There is a ready-made solution for this, e.g. Philips does sell alarm clocks with build in wake-up lamps, that turn on at morning to artificially sync humans internal clock. Me being hacker, I had to make my own solution, as usual. Read More …

VFD Returns!

IMG_5250I dug out my old VFD display project. This time I got some text showing up and prototype ready to be even bolted in some enclosure. I started with sawing piece of from original display controller as I didn’t bother to make PCB to house VFD screen, and all needed IC:s and connections were already there. Removing piece from 2mm fiberglass board is not easy task when your only tools are couple of hobby knives. But sawing boards with hacksaw would have caused more nasty fiberglass mess.  Read More …

VFD Schematics & code witchcraft

I have yet published basic schematics and code for display project. VFD controllerAtmega 16 work as display controller. It will read data from uart serial port, place it to text buffer and simultaneously  multiplex display trough segment voltage buffers and huge digit shift register. ASCII text is converted to segment data and font can be created with computer program. Read More …

Programming xmega with usbasp & avrdude

Few days ago I got package from Helsinki Hacklab. Some generic component stuff and a couple Atmel xmegas and breakout boards for them.IMG_8517 Nice bit more powerful MCU’s than normal atmegas & attinys, but they eat only up to 3.3v, so better not to kill them with 5V logic. Luckily most 5v logics detect 3.3v as high, and their higher output can be lowered with resistor divider. Programing these xmegas also differ from their li’l brothers. Xmegas use  PDI, which is kind of two wire system, constant clock signal and data I/O. I did not have expensive atmel programmer, so I improvised cheap ~2€ programmer using usbasp and avrdude using these patches. Read More …