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HOT AIR BALLOON These small hot air balloons are referred to as sky lanterns or glow lanterns   The balloons are simple and rely on the principles of increasing the air temperature inside the envelope making it lighter than the surrounding (ambient) air. The balloon floats because of the buoyant force exerted on it. This force is the same force that acts on objects when they are in water and is described by Archimedes' principle. The balloons are made of lightweight, flame retardant paper and use a small fire source made of paraffin wax to provide hot air. USES: Can be used as decorations and a source of entertainment during special occasions such as birthdays, weddings, parties, farewells, etc. As a model to teach children basics of flight The balloons can also be modified in order to carry out atmospheric analysis for pressure, humidity, composition, etc. Here is a small  video  clip of the hot air balloon rising..

In this post I will walk you through on how to write a program onto your AVR microcontroller to display your name on a 16x2 or 16x1 LCD. You do not require a lot of components or soldering. for simplicity, I used a female to female connector to connect the lcd to the microcontroller. I have soldered a header pin for the LCD module. First let us understand the LCD pin configuration.It has 16 pins. and works on parallel communication.one must also remember that LCD's are slow compared to the microcontrollers we use. hence we have to use a lot of delay(in order of ms not minutes :-P). among the 16 pins, there are three important pins, namely R/S,E,R/W which are addressed as Register Select, Enable,Read or Write respectively.To make it simple, in this post let us connect R/W to ground. which brings the lcd in write mode. so now we have 2 control pins namely RS and E and 8 data pins from D0-D7 to send parallel data. we also have two pins for power supply and two for LED backl