Last night was a lunar eclipse meaning that most people would have been out gazing up at the sky watching it. For some the eclipse evaded them using cloud cover, but instead of giving up, they got innovative. [Garrett] decided to build a moon simulator to keep track of the eclipse using a few spare parts and some quick code. The parts that were required for this project includes an Arduino UNO, a singular ShiftBrite Shield, a ShiftBar, ChronoDot and a Satellite Module 001. This is the perfect project for the Arduino to be used in because he had to toss it together very quickly and it is meant to be a temporary solution. If he were to make this permanent, we would guess that he would make a smaller and more cost effective version of the electronics. He documents his experience on Macetech.com in more detail and the outcome is pretty amazing. Code is yet to be posted but hopefully it is forthcoming soon as well as a video of the simulator working.
Correct…I wouldn’t dedicate any of these parts permanently. Possible to do on a small proto board with an ATTiny44 and RTC, plus three transistors to control the 100mA LEDs. More advanced moon clocks have dividers and more LEDs so you can actually show moon phase, too. But yeah, I had all the parts on hand, so was able to do this project on a purely reactionary basis. The Arduino is great for this type of thing.
woah! at first i thought that the picture was of an actual eclipse!
so realistic.
This is a pretty cool project. I’ve got some family that could have used something like this :)
That’s sitting on my desk!
I see a red Swingline stapler.
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This is going to be pretty useful in a few hundred years when the next total lunar eclipse happens. Time to get started!