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...

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...