Getting Started Watering a plant isn’t too hard, there are plenty of moisture sensors on ebay and you can get a small pump easily enough also. A few things I wanted to do: Program ADC outputs to be a power supply to the moisture sensor so I could plug it straight in the UNO Operate…
Clock using 3.5 Digit Seven Segment Display and no extra hardware
Its been a while since I wrote anything here, but today’s post is how to run a common cathode multi digit seven segment display without extra shift regs or buffers. I software multiplex the segments and use the INPUT_PULLUP mode of the digital pins to ensure only one digit is written to at a time….
Nunchuck Controlled 3D cube on TV
This is pretty cool – I took the TVout library, the Wiichuck library and wrote a 3D library. Put them all together and got a nunchuck controlled 3D shape on TV. Movement in the nunchuck is detected by the arduino, then the cube is redrawn according to new angle of the controller. At this point…
Scrolling Digital Clock on 8×8 LED Matrix
Another clock – digital this time This uses exactly the same circuit as the analogue clock. The code…
Analogue Clock on an 8×8 LED
OK so this is tiny but it implements the Bresenham line drawing algorithm and draws a clock… The code is pretty simple. Its running about 100x faster in this video so I can show how it works. [[Schematic soon]] <object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/8JVI-0b46Wc?hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/8JVI-0b46Wc?hl=en&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
More POV
Got some POV code working…. Problem is sync – not synched at all, so you can see what it says but it has no idea when to start the sequence relative to the user waving it about. We’ll investigate a switch with a weight on as a synch pulse soon. Here’s some pictures of the…
Persistance of Vision
Next up – persistance of vision… Pretty simple hardware – using the same 8 bit shift register from the thermometer project and driving LEDs from the outputs. The clever bit will be the software – but more about that next time. For now, here is the circuit diagram.
What next?
Well, now I’m excited! Can’t decide what to do next… Persistence of Vision, Lego Motors, Robot Arms… who knows? Maybe I’ll see what the kids say – this is really about teaching them stuff after all :o)
Thermometer and Clock
So, for our first trick we thought we’d try and conjour up a thermometer, and then we added a clock as well – just for good measure. Pretty much all the parts came from Cool Components or Maplin. I got a cheap 2 line display on sale which was the starting point, then wondered what…
Sunny Sunday
A good day to start a blog I think. Today I’ll publish my first Arduino project with details of how we put it together.
