Couple.

A rest place for couple.

Purple Xmas.

Blooming pink rose.

Silly Cat.

It is a bad shot, I keep this photo because this cat looks so silly:)

Toy Egg town.

It is so amazing to see so many toy egg machines out there.
But no new stuffs good to get one.

Gundam 00 figure.

A very nice gundam 00 figure displayed in the show.

New BB gundam : The Three Kingdoms series.

Just found this special function in a shopping mall to promote the new BB gundam series: The Three Kingdoms. It looks quite well.

Christmas gift : 134 Leds Christmas Tree.

I got a very surprising gift from K. It is a 134 Leds xmas tree and framed nicely with a black photo wood frame!
She worked so hard on soldering 134 leds, Thank you. The kit was bought from local electronic store, should be the same as MK117 sold in this online store: http://store.qkits.com/moreinfo.cfm/MK117

Here are some photos:

See it in action:

Walk with Booska.

Booska travels to TST/HK by MTR.

Take a photo in front of IFC/HK.

Rest @ Pacific Coffee and have a bottle of orange juice.

Model: Booska figure (made in Japan/1992)
Gear: Canon EOS400D/Sigma 30mm F1.4

LED Flower Vase

I want to make something simple, small and elegant for my lover’s birthday. Finally I come up with using 5×7 dot matrix led to make a flower vase, it can be used to display some text messages for her:)

Here are the components:

1. 5×7 dot matrix led
2. Atmel AVR tiny13
3. 2 x 74HC595 shift register with Latch
4. 2 x wooden prototype boards
5. 1 x coin battery holder
6. 1 x CR2032 coin battery (3V)
7. 3 x paper flowers
8. semi-transparent brown mud (from Franc Franc)
9. Switch for turning ON/OFF

I want to make things small, so I put the 5×7 dot matrix led horizontally and used the 5×4 dot matrix font, such that it can nearly display 2 characters at a time. For the MCU part, AVR Atmel tiny13 is a very small MCU, it is quite suitable for this kind of small application. The only problem is that it has limited IO pins, I have to use 2 x 74HC595 chips to extend the output pins, so I can driver 5×7 dot matrix led with only 3 IO pins, i.e. Clock Data, Latch.

Sorry for not posting any circuit digram, as I make it in hurry. After I spend a lots of time soldering the lines linking between the leds and the shift registers, here is the circuit board:

Then, I program the AVR Tiny13 with the STK500, the socket on the prototype board is a DIP socket, so I program the Tiny13 on STK500 and then put it back on the board to test. After several hours, the software is done.

Let’s put all the things together! I really love the effect when putting the led matrix in the transparent mud, the brown color is a good match.

Video demo:

Lastly, don’t forget the packing!

Hope you all may find useful.

Please also check out the notes by bitartist, including schematic & source codes:

http://www.bitartist.org/2009/02/led-flower-vase-supplementary-note.html