My electronics and stuff

A couple of years ago, I made a round word clock (see in this blog). It was based on an Arduino  Uno clone with shift registers to control the LEDs. This resulted in a lot of wires on the back of the clock: This left some room for improvements! So now, version 2.0: It is now based on an ESP32 and WS2812B LED's. At startup, it first connects to the internet via wifi to obtain the current time and then displays it on the round word clock. The wiring is much simpler now: But the best new feature is: color!! Each number/text has at least two WS2812b-LEDs behind it and for each single LED there's a constant color loop. This creates a really nice effect, as it will always show multiple colors at once. My kids love it. It does not have any demo modes yet. The plan is to add these demo's in a later stage. First on the list is a webpage to control the clock settings. And this webpage should also show the clock (maybe not in the nice color changes, as the might be to time consuming ...

Our (then two year old) daughter liked playing with a toy kitchen. She could play for hours in the Ikea (if we'd let her) with the Ikea toy kitchen. So for her third birthday we wanted to surprise her with an Ikea Duktig kitchen. But I thought it would be even cooler to have a toy kitchen with an actual timer in it. I talked about it with her and from that moment on, she wanted a kitchen that says 'Beep'. Here it is: I finished it the night before her third birthday! Here's a small movie of the kitchen in action: You can set the count down time in steps. It actually uses the exact same steps as the oven/microwave in our kitchen. Set the time with the + and - buttons, press start and the count down starts. When it reaches 0, it beeps three times and the display shows 'PIEP' (the Dutch spelling for beep). When the count down is not active, the current time is shown on the display. For those that are really inspired and want to upgrade their own Ikea Du...