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Very accurate master clock synchronized to the DCF77 time signal

Posted on September 5, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Brett’s new masterclock is Arduino-controlled and keeps very accurate time by periodically synchronizing with the DCF77 “Atomic” Clock in Mainflingen near Frankfurt, Germany. The DCF77 library for Arduino is used to decode the time signal broadcasted from the atomic clock. The time is displayed as hours, minutes, and seconds on six 1″ seven segment LEDs. A 4×20 I2C LCD display is also used in the project to display additional info such as display brightness, sync information, signal quality, auto tune’d frequency, auto tuned quartz accuracy, etc. Both the displays are auto-dimmed based on the surrounding light intensity using an LDR sensor

Arduino pill reminder

Posted on September 4, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

This Arduino-based Pill Reminder is suitable for people who often forget to take their medicines on time. It has 14 pill compartments in total and each compartment contains pills for a day of week. An RTC chip is used for timekeeping, and LEDs are used to light up the appropriate compartment every day. In addition, a proximity sensor is also implemented to sense a person approaching the device, which in turn, makes the LED blink to attract the attention.

Exploring HLK-RM04 Serial-to-WiFi Module

Posted on September 3, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

HLK-RM04 is a low-cost UART-ETH-WIFI module developed by Shenzhen Hi-Link Electronic co., Ltd with built-in TCP / IP protocol stack. In this article, Ray shares his first experience experimenting with this module and explores its Serial-to-WiFi capability using Arduino.

A Boy and His Atom: The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film

Posted on September 2, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

A Boy and His Atom is the world’s smallest movie made of rendered still images of the individually arranged carbon atoms on a copper surface using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The movie was made by IBM researchers and made of 242 individual stop-motion frames, with each frame measuring approximately 50 atoms wide. Here’s the movie posted on Youtube.

Three tact switches, three LEDs, three I/O lines

Posted on August 29, 2014 by R-B Leave a comment

Francois AUGER & Philippe Fretaud has posted this Design Idea on EDN that shows how to drive three LEDs and scan three tact switches with only three I/O pins of microcontroller. They have demonstrated the technique using the Atmel microcontroller (Arduino), and the technique could be useful for any low pin count devices where you can run out of I/O resources easily.

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