My electronics and stuff

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...

A while ago, I saw this blogpost on Hackaday. It shows a seven segment clock made of Neopixels. Actually, this was a brilliant idea, it's surprising that no one thought of it earlier. It's so simple and looks very nice. Although I liked the idea, I wasn't really thrilled by the design. It was -in my opinion- a (VERY) cool proof-of-concept, great for on a workbench, but not for on my nightstand. So that started me thinking (that's what I like about sharing ideas, inspiring others). As I did not have any single Neopixels lying around (or a LED strip with WS2812B's), I did have a WS2812B-LED ring, with 8 LED's. Why not make a clock out of those? This is the result: This clock runs on a Arduino Nano clone and uses a DS3231 to keep track of time (with backup battery of course). On the back, there are four buttons to set the time and run demo's. During the project, I made a Python simulation of it: This is the first implementation, a sort of proof-o...

As I was making a word clock, based on another instructable ( http://www.instructables.com/id/My-Arduino-WordClock/ ), me and my sister were wondering whether a round design would be cool too. While searching the internet, I could not find a round word clock, so we decided to design/create one ourselves. The clock displays the time somewhat similar as on a regular word clock. There are two major differences, on a 'regular' word clock the hours are words. On our word clock they're numbers just like a normal clock. The minutes (in 5 minute steps) are replaced by a word on the clock and the location of the word provides extra information. Note that I use Dutch templates, but an English version should work too. Of course some changes to the software are required. Here's the list of materials used for this clock: 1 - Ikea Pugg clock (costs around $12) 1 - Arduino Uno R3 1 - Real time clock module (based on a DS3231 clock chip) 1 - warm white LEDs on a str...

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, ...

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...