Fellow Canadian Laurence White from Electro-MCU-Stuff has built a neat looking project which uses a piezoelectric element from a tweeter to detect vibrations. He is using a Zilog eZ8 series microcontroller which breaks the Atmel, Microchip or TI norm for the projects we have seen around. I remember Zilog seemed to be very popular years ago but in recent years I haven’t heard much from them.

“The enclosure sits on top of a vibration sensor. Papydoo is waken up by a sufficiently strong vibration. Two eyes are then displayed on the LED matrix, wandering randomly around. After a few seconds with no vibration detected, the eyes close and Papydoo goes back to sleep. Also once in a while (odds: 1/5), a parade of “Space Invaders” is displayed, which bounces up with vibrations. There is a button at the back to manually switch through different modes: Eyes, Space Invaders, Vibration bar graph and batteries voltage. The project runs from 4 AA batteries and draws around 150uA when sleeping, and around 150mA when awake.”