Realize The Truth… There Is No Word Clock

August 24, 2016 by Moritz Walter 11 Comments

Do you always look at it encoded? – Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program.

Word clocks are supposed to de-encode time into a more readable format. Luckily [Xose Pérez] managed to recover the encoded time signal of the simulation we are all living in with his word clock that displays time using a stylish Matrix code animation.

[Xose] already built his own versions of [Philippe Chrétien’s] Fibonacci Clock and [Jeremy Williams’s] Game Frame, and while doing so he designed a nice little PCB. It’s powered by an ATmega328p, features an RTC with backup battery, an SD-card socket, and it’s ready to drive a bunch of WS2812Bs aka NeoPixels. Since he still had a few spare copies of his design in stock, his new word clock is also driven by this board.

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This VU Meter Is Built Into The Speaker

November 29, 2015 by James Hobson 20 Comments

Depending on the music you’re listening to, watching a VU meter bounce to the music is always a good time. So why not integrate the VU meter right into the audio source? That’s what [Matikas] did, and it’s pretty fantastic.

He started with a pair of speakers he had and picked up some NeoPixel LED strips. Carefully wrapping the LED strips around the inside circumference of each speaker, the LEDs fit behind the speaker grills, giving it a cool effect when they’re on.

To control the LEDs, he’s using an Arduino Uno (Atmega328p) which measures the audio level in order to modulate the LED output. A bit of software later (shared on GitHub if you’re interested!) and the VU meters were ready for action — check it out!

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Hacked Apartment Intercom Barks At You Or Buzzes You In

October 8, 2015 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Forgot your apartment keys? If you’ve got a ritzy building with a doorman, no problem. If your digs are a little more modest, you might only have an intercom panel that calls up to your apartment so someone can buzz you in. But if nobody is home, you’re out of luck. That’s why [Paweł] spent an hour whipping up an intercom connected automation system pack full of goodies.

The design is pretty simple – an ATMega328P to snoop on the analog phone ringer in the apartment when the intercom call button is pushed, and a relay wired in parallel with the door switch to buzz him in. For added security, the microcontroller detects the pattern of button presses and prevents unwanted guests from accessing the lobby. Things got really fun when [Paweł] added a PCM audio module to play random audio clips through the intercom. As you can see in the video below, an incorrect code might result in a barking dog or a verbal put-down. But [Paweł] earns extra points for including the Super Mario Bros sound clip and for the mashup of the “Imperial March” with “The Girl from Ipanema”.

True, we’ve seen a slightly more polished but less [Mario] version of this project before, but the presentation of this particular hack has us grinning from ear to ear.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: An SD Card Arduino

June 28, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

About a year ago, Intel announced they’d be launching a new platform stuffed into an SD card. Imagine – an entire computer packaged into an SD card, with nine whole pins for power and I/O. Cooler heads prevailed, the Intel Edison was launched, but the idea stuck; why can’t you fit an Arduino in an SD card?

[kodera2t] found out there’s no real reason why you can’t put a small microcontroller inside an SD card. For his Hackaday Prize entry, he created the SDuino, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin: an ATMega328p stuffed into a microSD adapter.

Unlike the other microcontroller stuffed in an SD card platform — the Electric Imp, [kodera] is, for the most part, respecting the standard pinout for SD cards. The MISO and MOSI signals are reversed, of course, one of the grounds on the SD pinout is tied to an analog input pin on the microcontroller, and the chip select on the SD pinout is ignored completely. Other than that, it’s the closest you’re going to get to an SD card with a microcontroller.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Fibonacci Clock Is Hard To Read, Looks Good

May 7, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

Artists have been incorporating the golden ratio in their work for many hundreds of years, and it is thought that when proportions are in line with this ratio, it tends to be more aesthetically pleasing. With that in mind, the clock that [Philippe] created must mathematically be the best looking clock we’ve ever featured, even if it is somewhat difficult to tell time from it.

The clock is made up of squares which represent the first five numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. The squares are backlit with LEDs, which will illuminate red for the hour, green for the minute, and blue representing the overlap of hours and minutes. Simply add up the red and blue squares to get the hour, and add the green and blue squares to get the minutes. The minutes are displayed in 5 minute increments since there aren’t enough blocks though, so you’ll also have to multiply. Confused yet? If not, it turns out that there are several ways to display certain times using this method, any of which can be randomly selected by the clock. [Philippe] reports that there are 16 different ways to represent 6:30, for example.

The clock is driven by an ATmega328P and is housed in a wooden case. There are schematics and code available on [Philippe]’s site if you want to build your own, there are detailed descriptions of how to tell time with this clock. You’ll probably need those. If you like getting confused by clocks, you might also like this one as well.

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Brewdoo Helps Keep The Office Coffee Fresh

April 25, 2015 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Until about lunch time, the coffee goes pretty fast in our office. Only a few of us drink it well into the afternoon, though, and it’s anyone’s guess how long the coffee’s been sitting around when we need a 4:00 pick-me-up. It would be great to install a coffee timer like [Paul]’s Brewdoo to keep track of these things.

The Brewdoo’s clean and simple design makes it easy for anyone in the office to use. [Paul]’s office has two carafes, so there’s a button, an RGB LED, and a line on the LCD for each. Once a pot is brewed, push the corresponding button and the timer is reset. The RGB LED starts at green, but turns yellow and eventually red over the course of an hour. Brewdoo has a failsafe in place, too: if a timer hasn’t been reset for four hours, its LED turns off and the LCD shows a question mark.

[Paul] knew he couldn’t touch the existing system since his company leases the equipment, so the Brewdoo lives in an enclosure that [Paul] CNC’d with custom g-code and affixed to the brewing machine with hard drive magnets. Although [Paul] designed it with an Arduino Uno for easy testing and code modification, the Brewdoo has a custom PCB with a ‘328P. The code, Fritzing diagram and Eagle files are up at [Paul]’s GitHub.

The Dan64: A Minimal Hardware AVR Microcomputer

April 7, 2015 by Elliot Williams 26 Comments

[Juan] sent us his writeup of a microcomputer he built using an Arduino UNO (AVR ATmega328p) and some off-board SRAM. This one’s truly minimalistic.

Have a look at the schematics (PDF). There’s an Arduino, the SPI SRAM, some transistors for TV video output, and a PS/2 connector for the keyboard. That’s it, really. It’s easily built on a breadboard in a few minutes if you have the parts on hand. Flash the Dan64 operating system and virtual machine into the AVR and you’re good to go.

Now we’ve seen a few 6502-based retro computers around here lately that use a 6502 paired with a microcontroller for the interfacing, but they’ve all been bulky three-chip affairs. [Juan] wins the minimalism prize by using a 6502 virtual machine implemented in the AVR to reduce the parts count down to two chips for the whole shooting match.

Using a 6502 virtual machine was a crucial choice in the design, because there are 6502 cross compilers that will let you compile and debug code for the microcomputer on your macrocomputer and then load it into the micro to run. This makes developing for the micro less painful.

How does it load programs you ask? The old-fashioned way of course, using audio files. Although rather than using the Kansas City Standard as in days of yore, he encodes the data in short and long pulses of square waves. This might be less reliable, but it sure saves on external hardware.

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