As an application platform, the TAP-28 has shown up in some unique projects!  Its low cost and easy interfacing to the real world make it ideally suited for embedded applications. 

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A Clock For Geeks

Here's a great retro clock for old-time electronics types - a clock that looks like a large analog voltmeter!  It's also great to hide your clock-watching from the boss.

Don't blink at noon or midnight or you'll miss the pointer zipping back to the start.

It's a simple design, using a TAP-28 board and a cheap hobby servo.

More details here, including links to a Hack-A-Day story.

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Irradiance Meter

A friend is evaluating a large-scale home solar panel system and the payback of using tracking and reflectors to increase solar panel output.

To aid his research, an irradiance meter was constructed using a TAOS TSL-230R light sensor chip. 

The Amicus compiler was selected for this project as it has some functions that make reading the TSL-230R simple.  The PIC18F25K20 processor required to use Amicus is a great choice for battery-powered instruments - it's happy running off a pair of AA or AAA cells. 

A unique feature of this project is using  a Handspring Visor PDA connected to the UART connector for I/O and data logging.

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Simple Signal Generator - Updated

A signal generator is a valuable asset on the work bench.  One was needed to test the software used in the irradiance meter software above and more recently to test some piezo buzzers.  The first version of this signal generator used a terminal emulator on a PC for control.  The revised version has a PC app to control the frequency and duty cycle just by entering the desired values.
 
The picture to right shows the signal generator output on the PICkit 2 Logic Analyzer.