Ticker

I was sitting there watching a football game with friends, when I started thinking how cool would it be to customize a sports ticker to only display the sports teams that you care about. This way you wouldn't have to sit there watching all the games scroll through when you really only care about a few teams. My first thought was I can do that, so I went home that night and started researching how to talk over the Internet with a micro-controller. Well, I found there were many ways to do this from buying kits that were all setup to talk over the Internet to interfacing directly from the micro-controller to the Ethernet jack. Since I wanted to play around with this idea quickly I decided to compromise on a SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) interface based Ethernet module. I figured this would allow for me to quickly connect to the Internet but still give me flexibility in my design. So a few on-line orders later the project began... and as it continued the possibilities grew...

Project Pic

Above is my test circuit, to the left you see my mini breadboard (These are awesome for small projects) with micro-controller and LCD Character display. On the right is the Ethernet module, both sitting on my power supply.