Are you a math aficionado in need of a new desk toy? Then do we have the project for you. With nothing more than an Arduino and a seven-segment LED module, [Cristiano Monteiro] has put together a little gadget that will slowly work its way through the digits of Pi forever…or until you get bored of looking at it and decide to use the parts for something else.
On the hardware side, we really can’t overstate how simple this project is. A common four-digit LED display is connected up to an Arduino Nano, which is then plugged into the computer for power. [Cristiano] is using a breadboard here, but you could just as easily use four female-to-female jumpers to connect the two devices together. We suppose this would be a pretty good project for anyone who’s looking to get some practical experience with PCB design as well.
The real magic is in the software, which [Cristiano] has been kind enough to release under the MIT license. Calculating Pi on such a resource-constrained chip as the ATmega328P is far from ideal, but by porting over a C++ algorithm developed by [Xavier Gourdon] and [Pascal Sebah] for their paper Computation of the n-th Decimal Digit of π with Low Memory he was able to pull it off, albeit slowly.
Now if you’ve got slightly better hardware, say a pair of Xeon processors and 96 GB of RAM, you could calculate Pi out to a few trillion digits for fun, but it wouldn’t look as cool as this little guy blinking away.
Source: SIMPLE ARDUINO BUILD LETS YOU KEEP AN EYE ON PI
