Simple little circuit for testing PIC12F675 microcontroller. When you start learning a programming language like C++, Visual Basic or any other language your first step is to write a program that displays "Hello World" on a computer's monitor. When you start learning how to program PIC microcontrollers an equivalent to that is blinking a LED.

PowerSwitch provides 8 bits of parallel output intended to switch e.g. the power supply to electronic devices. The PowerSwitch firmware is accompanied by a command line tool for Unix to control the device. (The command line tool can also be compiled on Windows using minGW and libusb-win32.)

The board supports driving two separate tri-color LEDs. More can be setup inline if desired. Currently the software only uses the second LED and its color represents the CPU load of the system in real-time. Blue for idle and gradients light blue, green, yellow, orange, and finally red indicating heavy CPU utilization. If the system fails to respond, the LED begins flashing RED to indicate a lack of communication from the software. This lets you easily identify a crashed machine in a rack for example.

LCD2USB is a open source/open hardware project. The goal of LCD2USB is to connect HD44780 based text LCD displays to various PCs via USB. LCD2USB was meant to be cheap and to be made of easily available parts. It is therefore based on the Atmel AVR Mega8 CPU and does not require any difficult to obtain parts like separate USB controllers and the like.

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