As part of the ongoing kitchen project, MrsH has decided that she wants some variable coloured LED strip lighting on top of the cabinets. Kit duly bought, the "colour fade" option is way too fast, and reminiscent of a 1970s disco rather than a soothing almost imperceptible shift.
So I dug out the old STK500 AVR dev kit to start building a new controller, deciding upon an ATMEGA8 microcontroller. First bit was to receive commands from quite nice looking IR remote control from the LED kit - solved used a TSOP4138 38khz IR receiver into a data pin on the AVR, and hack together some software to decode the RC5 and show the output on the LEDs on the dev board. I learnt more than I ever wanted to do about IR remotes in the process.
Then I hooked up a HD44780 LCD display that I'd had hanging around and meant to learn how to use, in order to be able to check what codes are being sent. Follow that up by writing some 4 channel PWM code to allow control of the LEDs (RGB above the cupboards, plus add in control for the white LEDs being used as under cupboard lights) and check this works by driving the LEDs on the dev board.
Now most of the IR buttons are mapped to reasonable functions in the software (presets for colours, etc., plus some additional ones to enable individual control of each LED brightness so I can run it in the kitchen, check what the RGB values for good colour combinations are the LCD and hard code those to preset buttons later.)
Just got to write the code for doing fades etc., and storing the current settings in EEPROM so that it powers up in the mode it was left in, then rebuild the circuit into a small project box (minus LCD, but with a header so I can plug it in for debug).
It's ages since I did any small microcontroller work, it's very satisfying.
