BuzzWatch: A personal tactile reminder

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BuzzWatch is a wearable tactile reminder device that can be programmed to vibrate at constant or random intervals notifying the wearer about the passage of time, as well as prompting them to think about what they are doing, and if they need to be somewhere else at the moment. The device uses the Atmel ATTiny13A MCU as its brain, with a thumbwheel potentiometer for setting the time interval of the reminder. A tiny vibrating motor works as a buzzer in the device. The whole electronics fit into a 3D printed ABS case with dimensions of 30x30x9mm. BuzzWatch runs off a 1225 lithium coin cell.

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Automatic garage door monitor and closer

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How many times you have trouble remembering if you have closed the garage door while you are away? Or, how many times you have discovered in the morning that your garage door was open all night? Well, if you are having this issue, you might consider building Adam Oakley’s automated garage door closer that shuts the door for you automatically when you forget. Powered by an Arduino Pro Micro board, it uses a ceiling-mounted HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor to sense the status of the garage door. When the door is open, it slides up close to the ceiling, and thereby

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Bluetooth enabled portable spectrometer

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Spectrometers are widely used in scientific studies to characterize the spectral signature of a material that represents how the matter interacts with an electromagnetic radiation at different wavelengths. The spectral data contains vital information like the chemical composition and crystal structure of the material, as well as the presence of any impurities or third element within it. A commercial spectrometer costs a huge amount of money. Akshat Wahi‘s WiSci is an open-source spectrometer tool intended to allow spectroscopy accessible to everyone. With Hamamatsu’s C12666MA mini-spectrometer at the front end, WiSc collects spectral signature from a target in wavelengths ranging from 340 to 780 nm. The hardware setup includes an Arduino

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NTP synchronized analog wall clock

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Analog wall clocks are an old invention. Besides telling time they also serve as a wall decoration. Most of the modern days inexpensive wall clocks are not good at keeping the time accurately. Also, they usually don’t have auto-adjustment for daylight saving time. Victor-chew shares his attempt to tether a cheap IKEA analog wall clock to the ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller and make it sync with a NTP server for accurate timekeeping as well as auto adjustment to daylight savings. In this project, I connected a cheap $2 Ikea analog clock to the ESP-12/NodeMCU dev module and synchronized the clock time with

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RGB matrix displays time and environmental data

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Temperature, humidity, and ambient pressure are the key parameters for environmental monitoring. With the advent of MEMS and integrated multi-sensor technologies, it’s been feasible to miniaturize environmental sensors and embed them into portable electronics. BME280 is one such fully integrated environmental unit from Bosch that combines sensors for pressure, humidity, and temperature in a tiny 8-pin metal-lid LGA package of size 2.5 x 2.5 x 0.93 mm³. This article describes how to read the environmental data from BME280 using Arduino and display the data on a 16×32 RGB matrix panel using the RGB driver shield. Things you will need Following items are used

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