To the casual observer this flower looks nice as its illuminated center fades in and out. But there’s hidden meaning to that light. Some of the blinks are longer than others; this flower is using Morse Code.
[Renaud Schleck] wanted to try a few different things with his MSP430 microcontroller. He decided on an LED that looks like a flower as it will be a nice piece of decor to set around the home. To add the Morse Code message he wanted something a bit more eloquent (and less distracting) than purely digital flashing. So he took the dots and dashes of the hard-coded message and turned them into fading signals by using Pulse-Width Modulation.
He free-formed the circuit so that it, and the coin cell that powers it, would fit in the flower pot. A reed switch is responsible for turning the juice on and off. When placed near a magnet the flower begins its gentle playback.
[via Reddit]
Now, it would be awesome if the leafs would be the antenna and the petal would be another resonator and the LED would therefore blink by the radiation .. the stipe is GND.
True morse code is transmitted over telegraph lines or the air *fingers crossed*
Very clever! I’m an ex-ham myself, and still remember the Morse code. it is still a great minimalist way to send and receive information.
Further thoughts…
1. How about “leaves” that are solar cells, to power it?
2. Have the micro measure the cell’s voltage, and change its message.
3. Shade its “leaves” with your hands to send Morse code messages *to* it?
Imagine having a conversation with a plant. “How are you?” “A little tired. More light, please.” :-)
Love it!
I think you could make it a little more organic-looking though, perhaps by never fading the LED all the way to off, and varying the min/max values slightly (not so much as to hamper readability, but enough to make it look a little more alive)
Also – there’s got to be some kind of cool way to integrate a vintage telegraph key.
Cool!
Hook it up to a Twitter feed, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
I was just about to say it’s the first blinky ever that’s all right in my book… if it never gets hooked up to Twitter.