Fletchtronics

I wanted a way to control MythTV and my television with a single remote control.

So I used a Bumble-B, an IR receiver and LUFA to create a USB keyboard from the Sony remote control for my television.

This setup turns out to be really nice. Since it is just a normal HID compliant USB keyboard, it literally works in any computer with USB support. No drivers are needed, just mappings of remote buttons to keyboard keys.

So most of the pre-orders have shipped.

As of this writing, there are two software issues you need to know about if you plan on developing new software to run on your BumbleB version 2. When these bugs are fixed in WinAVR and dfu-programmer, this post will be updated.

This thread is also open for general comments and issues regarding BumbleB version 2.

Peter Fleury's character LCD library is a handy library that works on a large number of 2 to 4 line character LCD models.

When shopping for LCDs you will recognize the type that will work immediately when looking at datasheets. These models all have the same 16 pin parallel interface (3 or 5 power pins, 8 data pins, RS, R/W, E). They all share the same instruction set and have a method for writing to both the screen (DDRAM) and writing pixels to the characters (CGRAM).

If you have a character LCD model that seems similar to the above description, it's very likely that this library will work.

Peter Fleury has an excellent collection of AVR software for some very common tasks. The next two posts contain knowledge gained as I learned how to use these libraries, including all the "gotchas" and complete descriptions of the code and circuitry. Hopefully this information will help get you started fast.

The first library we'll be looking at today is the i2cmaster TWI library. It is extremely useful for connecting to external TWI/I2C hardware quickly and painlessly.

Due to popular demand, fletchtronics.net is accepting pre-orders for Bumble-B version 2.

Read all about the original Bumble-B and about the Bumble-B version 2 updates.