Many players say that playing with artillery is kinda noobish and Rambo would never do that... Well, i agree that Rambo would never do that, for he could kill a whole army without reloading his M60. Nevertheless, i always add one artillery piece in my tactics to support my infantry, and to kill those Panzerwerfers and Katyushas. And sometimes, when i have a lot of points to spent, i get my favorite weapon, the Sturmtiger. It rarely becomes useful, unless the enemy has advanced fortifications that i cannot easily break. But i love the destructive power of this piece. Some other times, i get the Panzerwerfer or the Katyusha, if the enemy is a infantry geek. The weapons that i mentioned before and some others, after firing it's primary ammo, they need some time to reload - that is 180 seconds (3 minutes).

The Stalin's Organ needs quite a while to reload (via Wikipedia)

I tripled the original countdown timer circuit and here it is, on a breadboard for test

And now imagine this - You are in the heat of the battle, and the enemy is advancing. You have already fire all the rockets from the Katyusha. But the enemy has a lot of infantry marching towards you, and the D1 cannot stop it. Your IS3 is fighting this damn Tiger, while you notice that a Puma along with 15 or so armed men is coming from the east to flank your artillery. After loosing 4 squads of SMG infantry and your D1, you realize that the Katyusha was already loaded... Damn... You could have stop them with a single strike.

The above scenario is not science fiction. In the heat of battle, you may forget to check your weapons if they are reloaded, or you may loose valuable time checking them often. That happens to me all the time. And here is another fore frustrating scenario. the enemy is an artillery lover. He has already 3 Katyushas behind his lines. When they are reloaded, he comes out of the sudden and BOOM, you hear the "Stalin's Organ". You do have this howitzer waiting them, but now it needs time to reload and rotate... If you just knew when he is about to hit...

So, i will add three 180 second timers to remind me these situations. If the enemy for example fires a slow-reloading weapon, i will click the timer to know when his weapon is reloaded. And if i use a slow-reload weapon, i will have the timer to inform me when this weapon is reloaded to fire again. The circuit is this Fixed Countdown Timer For -Geek- Gamers that i made exactly for this reason. I changed it a little bit, and added 3 independent countdown timers in a single chip.

Here is the new circuit:

The circuit is powered directly from the PS2 port, in parallel with the other PIC. The only thing to notice here is how i interfaced the 3 buttons. I only have 6 I/O ports (5 I/O and 1 I), which i have to interface 3 buttons 3 LEDs and a buzzer. To save one port for the buzzer, i used the 2 diodes. The buttons now sends a binary signal to the 2 ports. 00 means no button is pressed. 01 means the 1^st button is pressed. 10 means that the 2^nd button is pressed while 11 (through the diodes) means that the 3^rd button is pressed. This way i saved one port to interface the buzzer.

Although the firmware is a tripled version of the original firmware from the Fixed Countdown Timer For -Geek- Gamers circuit, i will take it as a new one and start it from version 1.0. Here is the latest version of the firmware:

Men Of War timer - Assembly listing - V1.1

Men Of War timer - HEX file - V1.1

Men Of War timer - Assembly listing - V1.0

And if you just want the hex file just to upload...:

Men Of War timer - HEX file - V1.0

Resistors
R1-3	Resistor 330 Ohm 1/4 Watt 5% Carbon Film
Semiconductors
LED1-3	LED 3mm red
D1-2	1N4148 Switching Diode
Integrated Circuits
IC1	PIC12F519 Microcontroller
Misc
SG1	Buzzer 5V PCB-Mount buzzer

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