Wireless Internet Access via LED lamps.

Can you imagine while the LED is lighting up your desk and streaming video to your laptop at the same time? Scientist he Semi-conductor Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences designed a wireless internet communication system using only Blue LED lights on the ceilings. The maximum speed is around 2Mbps.

EZ-430 Chronos Wireless Watch controlled Door Entry System.

I have been waiting for cool projects using the TI EZ-430 wireless watch, and it comes up one today! You can unlock the door wirelessly by just taping the watch screen with a sequence. The sequence is then detected by the internal accelerometer and translated to a door lock pattern. If it is correct, it would unlock the door:)

Hard to say how cool is it, Lets see the demo! Cool Project, Ziyan!



Details of implementation: https://ziyan.info/2010/01/secure-wireless-door-lock/

TI eZ430 Chronos Watch get reviewed.

Now you can order @ TI store for $49.

Cheap wireless communcation with Infrared.

JSR,self-taught artist, made a cheap wireless communication circuit for his music project using adruino, he made a simple circuit to convert the normal UART port to infrared signals. A wireless serial port is born! The circuit and codes are simple, please check out jacob's website here.


For the transmitter, looks like:

Very simple and clean!

Video demonstration:

Cheap wireless solution for AVR/MCU projects.

The nRF24L01+ is a 2.4GHZ RF Transceiver produced by NORDIC semiconductor, it is a very small , powerful and low-power solution for your home project. I am studying how to interface with my AVR MCUs. Luckily, I found out someone has a driver written for AVR, it is well-documented and easy to follow. Check out the link here: http://www.tinkerer.eu/AVRLib/nRF24L01. Basically, you need to have a SPI interface, so most of the AVR MCUs have! so How far can it goes? Sparkfun did a test, around 360feet LOS.

Blimpbot controlled by Android G1 wirelessly.

It is controlled by moving the android G1, the directions are calculated from the accelerometer inside the android G1. So you G1 is just like your Wiimote now. Moreover, there is a camera on the blimp, so you can see the video streaming from the blimp in real time also. It is a really cool project. I hope I can play with blimp too! May be later, you all may see my blimp project:) Cheers.


Link:
http://www.surveyor.com/

The wireless rabbit: Nabaztag

What is Nabaztag?

The cute wifi rabbit is another internet widget device, it connects to the community server online and user with the rabbit can use it as a medium to communicate. Sounds funny when you have a group of friends with the rabbit at home. The wireless rabbit can move its cute ear and also light up the RGB leds inside to express the feeling and mood. It is capable of using as Alarm clock, weather reporter and RSS feed readers.

The Internal

What surprise me is the hardware inside. The rabbit is using a PIC18F6525 MCU and a PCMCIA BenQ 802.11b wifi card. It is not so strong as I guess. The network software stack is done on the PIC including the TCP/IP stack and the 802.11 stack. It is hard to imagine to get all these stacks on a PIC, so they did it. One similar cool project I found is the WLAN for AVR project, I will consider to use uClinux if the cost is not really an issue:)

Some internal photos by Pokie


External Links

Official Site: http://www.nabaztag.com/
Community Site: http://my.nabaztag.com/
Rabbit tear down photo: http://pokie.dyndns.org/photos.php?album=nabaztag&page=1

Chumby now avaliable.

Chumby is a real-life widget device as I call. It has a 3.5" LCD touch screen, speaker, microphone, 2 USB 2.0 ports and also the wireless 802.11bg adapter inside. Basically it is a device that capable of running widget making by Adobe Flash and fetching information from the WWW via wireless connection.

You can use it as normal alarm clock, playing mp3s, displaying photos from flickr, youtube, weather report and also some other cool stuffs that made by developers all over the world. It is a open hardware/software product, developers are welcome to make their applications inside the Chumby, they can make Flash Widget and also hack the Linux kernel as you wish.

The USB ports allow you to connect your iPod and also USB disks, and USB to Ethernet adapter also. It is excited to see how other developers making of this open platform to make something cool. It was announced in late 2006 and only become available to public in Feb 2008. Many people are waited so long for the cool chumby. So now, order it @ http://store.chumby.com/, it costs US$179.9.


The Chumby industries: http://www.chumby.com/

The Widget: http://www.chumby.com/guide

The Development wiki: http://wiki.chumby.com/