AlferSoft Blog

The Scoreboard project is now finished and working!
The idea of this project is pretty simple: control a ping-pong electronic scoreboard from an Android bluetooth-enabled device.
To do this, I used an ATtiny45 which main function is to display the current scores in a VGA monitor while reading from a bluetooth module UART interface waiting for “commands” that will tell it what to display. The Android device sends the commands via bluetooth, running an application specially designed for this project.
As usual, the whole project is open source, including schematics, AVR firmware and the Android application.
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In this post, you will find how the Bluetooth module interacts with the ATtiny45 in the VGA Scoreboard project.
The Bluetooth module will wait for a connection from a device (e.g. an Android phone) and will act as an SPP (Serial Port Profile) re-passing everything received from the device to the UART interface. In our case the ATtiny will read the data but won’t “speak back” to the module, so it’s really a one way communication from that point of view.
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I finally received some stuff from DealExtreme.com including a cheap Bluetooth Module which I will use to finish my remote scoreboard project.
But first, I made this small PCB to adapt the module to a breadboard for testing and programming. I found on the Internet someone that already did this, but I wanted to use the SPI programming interface too, then I needed to lay pins 14 to 21 let’s say vertically, to be able to plug it on the protoboard.
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As it was suggested by Hackaday’s guys, I’ve added a simple push button in the only available pin of my ATtiny45 in order to control the Tiny Pong VGA. The switch toggles the paddle direction up and down, every time you release it.
I’ve made some little changes in the code, so check it out, you might find something interesting or useful. As always, source code, schematics, etc. freely available for download.
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jQuery lightBox is a great plugin inspired in the well-known Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar.
After starting using it I realized that things became messy with big images, so I made a small modification to limit the image size to the current browser window size.
Also I added an option to hide the image information. The images used to navigate between images and close the preview are in English, so I modified the images to be more neutral (just icons)
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The goal of this experiment is to convert the Arduino board into an USB keyboard plus a VGA sniffer to crack the password of a standard BIOS using the brute force attack method. There are no advantages in using this method, in fact this can be very slow and you may never find the password at all, but as always we do it for fun. It’s just a proof of concept, there are many ways of resetting a BIOS specially if you have access to the hardware, and you need it anyway because we’re talking about BIOS and there is no “remote access” as far as I know.
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If you are planning to migrate your Google App Engine application to the “new” High Replication Database scheme, then you probably know that the Google migration process won’t handle Blobstore files.

Here you will find some python scripts that will help you to move the Blobstore files from the old application to the new one, and correct all the references in the new database. As always, use at your own risk, don’t try to do anything without reading and understanding the scripts, otherwise you may loose your data permanently.

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I’m still waiting for my cheap Bluetooth module from China which will serve as an input interface for my scoreboard project. In the meantime, I’ll show you how to convert your ATtiny microcontroller into a Pong game (with no input so far).

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Some quick thoughts about the Arduino Duemilanove board.

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This project aims to display a scoreboard in a regular VGA monitor, remotely controlled with an Android device (cellphone, tablet) via Bluetooth.

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