My electronics and stuff

And now, will it work? Well, to be short, yes it does work: So, how does it work? Well, each column is a class, that has 4 'variables', Id, Steptime, Length and Row. Id contains the column number which is set when a new column object is created. The length contains the number of LED's for a 'snake', so one white followed by a number (length minus 1) of green ones. The steptime sets the speed, as it contains the number of milliseconds the Arduino should 'wait' to move the colored snake. When a new column object is created, the Steptime, Length and Row are set at random within a certain range. The matrix is powered via the laptop, as it draws only 100mA. When a light diffuser is used in broad daylight, it'll probably require more power. But this is only a proof-of-concept. There are still things to improve. I want to make it customizable to use in different matrix sizes, before I 'release the code'. Well, it's not that difficult t...

Next step is of course the matrix effect on a LED-matrix. For this, I used a 60 WS2812B LEDs/meter LED strip from eBay. These strips can be easily cut using scissors. Be aware, that this isn't completely true, as a strip consists of shorter strips, soldered together. At such solder point, you need a wire cutter. Then I used some painters tape, to glue the strip to a sheet of cardboard. Note that the strips are in zigzag-formation. Last step was connecting all 5V->5V, DOut->DIn and GND->GND pairs as shown in the pictures below. Part 3 covers finding a power supply, connect the LED-matrix to an Arduino, tweak the code to show the matrix effect on the matrix instead of serial output.

A colleague of mine is currently building a nice word clock based on a 10 x 10 WS2812B matrix. I have already built (but not finished!) two 'regular' word clocks. The first one is a manually soldered 10 x 10 LED matrix in a Ikea Ribba frame. This matrix is great as it allows you to show animations and scrolling texts. My second word clock is a simpler one, you can only light words (using 3 shift registers). Hmm, maybe I should have started with the simple one? But a WS2812B based clock, provides you with an extra dimension: c o l o r !!! And the first thing we thought of, is the Matrix-effect! The green screen with falling letters, how cool would that be on a word clock? Surprisingly enough, we could not find a YouTube video showing what we wanted. Ok, googling on matrix and word clock, well, that's a very common combination. So, this night I tried to make an Arduino program that shows a bit of the Matrix effect! I haven't had the time to make WS2812B matrix yet, ...

Some time ago, I saw this really cool Raspberry Pi based RFID-enabled cassette player. It ran PiMusicbox and the maker created a module to control PiMusicbox via RFID. This would be perfect for my three year old daughter. Ok, as she's clearly not familiar with cassette players, I needed something simpler. She already had a KNG Andrew MP3-player, that plays MP3's from an SD-card and is controlled via touch buttons. For those who are not familiar with this player, it's simply an SD-card based MP3-player with built-in speakers that looks like a robot. So, the idea was born, an RFID controlled Raspberry Pi based music robot, or short RFID Music Robot (that's how we refer to it at home). My daughter really loves her music robot, when she wants music, she chooses the tag she wants, holds it near the robot and it will play her favourite music! Although PiMusicBox is a very easy to install music player for the RaspberryPi with many installation guides, I could not find a gu...

Just admit it, we all like to make clocks (well, people who found this blogpost via Google often do). One of the simplest clock to make is an Arduino based clock with a 7-segments display. Not going into details (at least not in this post, perhaps I'll make an Instructable for this clock), but for this clock you need an Arduino, a DS3231 real-time clock module, a 7-segments display and a rotary encoder. As you probably guessed from the title, I'm using a TM1637 based display. All parts are very cheap and can be easily obtained via eBay. There are many tutorials/blogs/instructables explaining how to make an Arduino clock based on a DS3231 and a TM1637 display. And then I wanted to set the time via a rotary encoder. Simply click, set the hours by turning, click again, set the minutes by turning, click again and done. That's a rather simple method to set the time and I'd wish many of my clocks had that feature (in my car, the microwave, alarm clock, etc.). This page...