mightyOhm

Has anyone else noticed that the ATmega48/88/168 family of 8-bit AVR microcontrollers recently joined Atmel’s “mature devices” list, shown above?

Truthfully, I was not surprised to see this, having been tipped off by an Atmel sales rep earlier this year at ESC in San Jose.

The good news is that while these much-loved ATmega devices are slowly being obsoleted, they are being replaced by the largely-identical ‘PA’ series, which includes the ATmega48PA, ATmega88PA, ATmega168PA, and the ATmega328P.  The ‘PA’ devices are enhanced versions of the former ‘P’ series, which added energy-saving picoPower functionality to the original devices.

Porting code to the new family should be fairly straightforward given that the PA family is designed to be a drop-in replacement.  To help with the switchover, Atmel has released some migration notes, including AVR512, “Migration from ATmega48/88/168 to ATmega48P/88P/168P” and AVR528, “Migrating from ATmega48/88/168 and ATmega48P/88P/168P to ATmega48PA/88PA/168PA“.  Regardless, check your header files and fuse bits for any changes.

If you are anxious about switching devices, don’t panic, the ATmega48/88/168 devices are still in stock at all major distributors, while the PA devices aren’t even on the radar yet.  While professionals might want switch AVRs for new designs, hobbyists will likely still be using the older devices for years to come.  (Long live the PIC16F84!)

A few people have asked me about the playlist that ships with the interface.sh script for my Wifi Radio project.

I’ve actually modified my playlist slightly, so here’s what I’m currently listening to.  Click on the links to open each station in Winamp or iTunes.

1. SLAY Radio

http://slayradio.org/tune_in.php/128kbps/listen.m3u

SLAY Radio is dedicated to playing original and remixed tunes from the Commodore 64.  Regular live shows that feature guest DJs who select and play their favorite C64 tunes, plus occasionally some stuff from the Amiga and other platforms.  SLAY Radio inspired me to dust off my old sid and mod files.  Does it get any better than this?

This cool banner shows what song is currently playing.  Click to visit their site.

2. KCRW Simulcast

http://scfire-dtc-aa06.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1046

An NPR affiliate based in Los Angeles, KCRW has a wide variety of music and talk radio programming.  They also transmit on FM 89.9MHz.

3. Bassdrive

http://www.bassdrive.com/v2/streams/BassDrive.pls

Bassdrive plays jungle and drum and bass (see dnb).  Lots of live shows and guest DJs.  One of my favorites.

4. di.fm - Soulful House

http://www.di.fm/mp3/soulfulhouse.pls

This group of six stations are hosted by Digitally Imported, which offers a wide variety of electronic dance music at both free and premium (higher quality/bitrate) paid membership levels.

5. di.fm - Lounge

http://www.di.fm/mp3/lounge.pls

6. di.fm - Breaks

http://www.di.fm/mp3/breaks.pls

Di.fm’s breaks station.  Another one of my favorites.

7. di.fm - Electro House

http://www.di.fm/mp3/electro.pls

8. di.fm - Future Synthpop

http://www.di.fm/mp3/futuresynthpop.pls

9. di.fm - Progressive

http://www.di.fm/mp3/progressive.pls

10. Groove Salad

http://somafm.com/play/groovesalad

Hosted by San Francisco-based soma.fm.  Plays “A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves.”  Like many of the others on this list, this station has been around forever.  It’s probably one of the first Shoutcast stations I ever tuned into, and it’s still going strong almost a decade later.

Of course, if you don’t like these presets or just want to see what else is out there, check out shoutcast.com.  You can browse or search through hundreds of other streaming radio stations featuring every possible genre of music you could think of.

Teleport is a program for OS X that lets you share one keyboard and mouse between multiple computers - very handy for when you want to turn a macbook into a makeshift second display for your Mac desktop.  Before I discovered teleport, I was using synergy, which achieves almost the same result but requires an open Terminal window to launch and use it (synergy’s daemon functionality is broken in Leopard).  Teleport has some other advantages over synergy, including drag and drop file support (really cool!) and working mouse-wheel scrolling.

I initially had some problems with a short delay when moving the mouse from my desktop to the remote display, but I quickly resolved this by making a couple changes to the teleport configuration:

1. Uncheck “Show bezel when controlling shared Mac” in the teleport control panel options, as shown below.  This actually makes a noticeable difference.



2. Disable the switch animation by executing this command in a Terminal window:

   defaults write com.abyssoft.teleport showSwitchAnimation NO

Now my pointer moves almost instantaneously from one display to the next, even with one machine on Wi-Fi.  Curiously, I only had to make the changes on the server side, I left the client machine preferences alone.

Hopefully this will help other folks who are having the same issue.

abyssoft - teleport.

Microchip Technology, makers of the PIC microcontroller, have released a demo board for the 8-bit PIC18F67J60 that is pre-programmed to function as an internet radio receiver.

Anyone familiar with the blog knows that I have a special love for internet streaming radio, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that this demo board immediate caught my eye.

The demo board’s features include ethernet, a dedicated MP3 decoder IC, pushbutton user interface, and a cool OLED matrix display.  The PIC18F67J60 includes an ethernet PHY on-chip,  which makes for a very simple way to add network connectivity to the microcontroller.  Sadly, unlike my usual hacking platform, there isn’t any wireless on-board, but given the extremely small size and downloadable source code, I am really tempted to get one of these to play with.

Here’s a short video about the board by MicrochipTechnology on YouTube:

Internet Radio Demonstration Board.

A couple weeks ago, I posted about Madox, who created a floating camera platform based on an Asus WL-520gU wireless router and called it the Madox Floating Camera, or MFC.

Great news - he finished putting the MFC together just in time for the Australian Battle Group meet on June 6th and posted some pictures and videos of it in action.  Apparently the assembly involved a lot of duct tape and he had a few minor issues with the rig, but you can’t tell from the videos!

For technical details about this project, check out his MFC project page.

Here’s a sample video of scale warship combat as seen by the MFC:

(Note: your speakers are not broken, there is no audio!)

I really love this project and I hope to keep reading about it as Madox works out the bugs.

Madox - Keep up the good work!

Madox.NET » Australian Battle Group - National Battle Meet 6 June 2009.