UptownMaker

This was originally going to be my calling card for Maker Faire. It's a very simple implementation of Osamu Tamura's AVR-CDC project , realized without a board. I had planned to make it a small device that can be plugged into a USB port and observed on a terminal spitting out information about me. The Great Global Hackerspace Challenge project took a lot out of me, though, so I didn't get it done in time. The blobby on the left is an I/O module- three input switches, three output LEDs, and a reset switch and power LED. It plugs onto the header that is currently being used for programming. The circuitry is pretty simple: 100nF bypass capacitor, the 5V in from the USB port goes to the positive supply pin through a 1N4001, and the USB D+/D- are connected to a couple of the I/O pins. Some words about that 1N4001: it was chosen specifically for its high forward voltage. See, the USB input wants a 3.6V input or so, and the AVR doesn't want to run at the 16+MHz needed for t...

I'm so down with Atmel's Qtouch library . Basically, it lets you add capacitive touch detection to your projects- and it works through non-conductive surfaces. Think touch-sensitive sealed keypads, or the scroll wheel from the older generation of iPods. Nobody- as near as I can tell- has this working with the Arduino environment yet. It should be doable, because you can do it in AVRStudio compiling code through WINAVR, which is just a distribution for AVR-GCC, which is what Arduino compiles its code with. I'm working on it, but here, in the meantime, is a walk-through of getting the Qtouch demos working with the '328P found on the Arduino board (under Windows- don't bug me about figuring out how to use it in Linux): 1. Download and install AVRStudio from Atmel- annoyingly, you have to fill in a long-ish form with the standard information about who you are and what you're doing. This is not, in and of itself, TOO annoying- but the fact that they make you d...