Miro's Blog

Hardware I recently assembled a Lego phone holder that rotates along the Y-axis (the longer side of the phone). The holder's end is attached to a servo motor, which is connected to an Android smartphone via USB OTG through a motor module. This motor module can control up to 24 servo motors and operates at 5 volts. Software The motor module has its own built-in protocol, which handles rotation and speed, with parameters separated by newline characters. The second part of the project involved developing an Android application to communicate with the servo module using this serial protocol. I based the application on an example of USB serial communication with Arduino, adapting it to work with my device. Game For this project, I chose a game I developed about a year ago. It's a simple game where the accelerometer controls a rocket that must navigate through gates. Tilting the device left or right adjusts the rocket's position, and the goal is to pass through as many gates as p...

Idea The goal of this project was to explore using a numeric LED display with a microcontroller (MCU). To make it more engaging, I decided to create a wall clock that displays time both digitally and analogically. I chose the Atmega16L MCU for its 26 I/O pins—12 for the numeric display, 12 for the 2mm LEDs, and 2 for the buttons. The clock features two buttons: one to add hours and another to add minutes. The 2mm LEDs around the edge represent seconds, while the numeric display in the center shows hours and minutes. Display I sourced my display from eBay without a datasheet, but the pin configuration is typically similar across different displays. The four 7-segment digits are controlled by 12 I/O pins—each digit consists of 8 segments (7 for numbers and 1 for the dot). The remaining four pins are used as grounds for each digit. To illuminate all four digits, the MCU must rapidly switch between them. Timers Timers are fundamental counters in microcontrollers. The ATmega16 features two ...