Quick Aldi Solar Shed light modification

Here's a quick modification to turn the Aldi Solar Shed light into a dark-triggered lamp.
Three components are used: a resistor, a light-dependent resistor and an N-channel MOSFET. A variable resistor was used for tuning.

simple tone/music player

Here's a reasonably simple way to get ugly square waves playing music, much like an old Nokia ringtone. It has been configured to use the G2211 that comes with the MSP430 Launchpad. It doesn't really need any special functions and can run on other value line MSP430s. This project uses Code Composer Studio 5.2 with Grace.

All you need to add is a speaker between P2.6 and GND (they're adjacent pins) and press the button connected to P1.3. The code isn't all that elegant and I've ignored all the new ULP rules.

The DCO is set to 12MHz for the purposes of interrupts. I have included a spreadsheet that calculates the constants from music note frequencies into the adjusted DCO periods. The main function changes the note and duration while the interrupt routine toggles the output and keeps track of time for the note period and total duration.

http://db.tt/HKXGJrFq

This particular file plays 'Thaxted'. I found the sheet music from the Mutopia Project's website.

Bike light phase 1

Finding the right combination of price, brightness and battery configuration can be difficult for a bicycle light. I started off with one from here:
http://www.buyincoins.com/details/white-led-head-bike-bicycle-light-flashlight-w-mounting-access-02-product-379.html

It came with a pretty useless reflector and LED.
My next step was to replace the LED with a Cree XM-L. It's a bit excessive but oh well.

I had read about the epoxy layer being too thick on the board so I followed some steps to make the thermal interface more direct. My tubes of Arctic Silver thermal epoxy had gummed up so it was a bit of trouble gluing it down!

Running off three rechargeable AAA cells directly, the LED draws around 350mA. I'd say this is about the minimum I'd go with for now, with about 1W output. I'll take the XM-L module to phase two and swap in an older module for this torch... I think I still have an XR-C somewhere that I haven't blown up yet.