Now that I have my quick protoboard together it allows me to take other people’s projects and put them together really quickly. Today I built the USB-LED-Fader. Since the hard parts were already done it took about 5 minutes to add the 4 resistors and LEDs to a breadboard. Then another 5 minutes to compile and upload the firmware using the bootloader.

Then I spent about an hour playing with the different LED patterns. This is a really fun project. I can see tons of potential for different status lights. Tie a cpu meter to one of the lights… the faster it flashes the more cpu is being used. One LED for email status. One for network traffic. And finally one for server status.

(The photo from the atmega8 development board shows this project on the breadboard.)