This DIY Vacuum Fluorescent Display Driver uses a 555 Timer to drive it. Most of us have used a 7 segment display before and they are very simply to power since they are just LEDs and it is very simply to power LEDs. Kerry Wong had a VFD but no driver, he built one using a 555 timer, a hand wound transformer and a hand full of other components.

“One of the key design considerations for the filament driver is the need to “float” the filament potential above the ground. This offset voltage is necessary to prevent ghosting (see this app note for more detailed explanation). Also in order for the illumination to be uniform, an AC drive current waveform from a center-tapped transformer is desired.”

There are a ton of sensors available for the Arduino. These days indoor air quality is on the mind of many people wanting to improve the quality of life and health. What could be better than a home made system that uses and Arduino and a bunch of sensors to monitor everything around you. This project also interfaces with Thing Speak to allow the data to be viewed online.

Want to make a tiny scope? This Arduino LCD Oscilloscope project would be a fun weekend project.

 ”I used an Arduino Fio board that I picked up from SparkFun.com (available at Amazon.com) and a small SPI graphical LCD board that I picked up for a few bucks at dx.com (SKU 153821, also apparently available at Amazon.com).”

This project demonstrates how to use a voltage divider to read in analog voltages with an Arduino. Since we are using a voltage divider the voltage that the chip sees is within it’s range even though in this case the voltage measured can be up to 50 volts. The Arduino then calculates the actual 4 analog volages and outputs them on an LCD. Have a look at the code provided to implement this in your next project.

Via: Electronics Lab

If you want to be notified whenever the Space Station is flying overhead this Space Station Lamp project by Nathan from Mechanical Integrator is sure to help out. A number of LEDs edge light a piece of frosted plexiglass and a Teensy microcontroller does the work. Some Python code is used to check to see when the Space Station is over head. If you are interested in making something similar Nathan has provided all of the details. He also had a successful Kickstarter raising over 18 thousand back in 2011 so there is a good chance you could still buy one of these! 

Via: EEWeb

Congrats to Jeremy Blum for graduating from Cornell University! He made a cool Remote Controlled Graduation Cap that he controls using a custom built wrist control box. The cap has an RGB LED in it and is capable of not only grabbing user submitted color suggestions but also a variety of pre-programmed ones. If you would like to see how it works Jeremy has made it open source and you can see the code here. 

This Hand Controlled Tetris Like Game uses an Altera FPGA to captures a video signal and looks for a players hand skin color. The system tracks their hand movements and looks for the user moving their hands forward and back by determining how tall the skin colored object is over time. The goal here is to prevent the falling tetris like blocks from falling by rapidly pushing and pulling on them. If you want to use this as a starting point for your creation Tian Gao has documented the entire system here.

Thanks for sending this in Tian!