Crafting a panel meter calculator with floating point

Article excerpt

Michał Zalewski on the lcamtuf’s thing blog writes: I’m a bit of a calculator nerd. For a while, calculators lagged behind general-purpose computing because of the lack of a suitable display technology. I constructed the display itself out of six generic “SO-45” panel voltmeters from Amazon, plus one vintage edgewise voltmeter scored on eBay. The panel was the easy part; next, I had to come up with an enclosure. The final portion of the project is the control circuitry. Some folks egged me on to implement analog calculations, but that would make the calculator even less practical, and if you want to take that route, purely-mechanical designs are more fun. So, the brains of the operation is an 8-bit AVR128DA28 MCU. Check out the fun project write-up here and the code here.