Tuesday, May 17, 2011

AVR Sketch Board

The project is an electronic version of an Etch-A-Sketch toy for kids. It can electronically emulate every function of the original. The system use Hyundai HG225504 LCD as screen which displays 256 pixels wide and 128 pixels high. Instead of a complex mechanical rail and pulley system to control the X and Y movement, Etch-A(vr)-Sketch uses 10-turn potentiometers. To erase any text and drawing on the screen, user need to shake the device. The system has been equipped with piezoelectric accelerometer to accomplished this task.


The heart of system uses AVR ATmega16 Microcontroller. This includes digital IO for use with the LCD control and data busses, a 16-bit timer used to pace the system, the internal oscillator used to clock the system, and the A to D converters used to monitor the 10-turn potentiometers and the accelerometer. Even the hardware multiplier was used to speed up some calculations. The firmware was developed in C using WinAVR compiler. The Etch-AVR-Sketch project is designed by Greg Cloutier for US.

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