Don’t know about you, but over the last year or so, we have gone from spending ten or twelve hours a day at this computer to upwards of sixteen or eighteen. Fortunately there’s a window behind the monitor for taking those 20/20/20 breaks that are supposed to prevent eye strain, but it’s so hard to remember (and boring) to do it. And nobody needs yet another thing to remember in the name of self-care.

[Daniel Hingston] certainly agrees. As you’ll see in the delightful video after the break, [Daniel] has made a game out of the whole process of stopping every twenty minutes to spend twenty seconds looking at a point that’s at least twenty feet away. Once the break is over, [Daniel] uses the dual-purpose start button to acknowledge having looked away for 20 seconds. The device is meant to clip onto the corner of any monitor, and [Daniel] has provided several sizes of the bridge piece so that everyone can find their fit.

The Guardian’s guts are pretty simple — an Arduino Pro Mini runs the stop watch and a TFT display to show the graphics that live on an SD card. This is a great way to preserve your eyesight by gamifying something we all know we should be doing. It might be nice to add a break timer that counts up to 25 or thereabouts so you have time to stand up and come back. If you press the button too soon, it scolds you and you have to start your eye break over.

Need some more self-care lately? Our own [Jenny List] has your back in these interesting times.

We’ve seen a lot of coffee roaster builds over the years. [Ben Eagan] started his with a hot-air popcorn maker. If you think it is as simple as putting beans in place of the popcorn, think again. You need to have good control of the heat, and that requires some temperature monitoring and a controller — in this case, an Arduino. [Ben’s] video below shows how it all goes together.

With the Arduino and the power supply strapped to the sides, it looks a bit like something out of a bad post-apocalypse movie. But it looks like it gets the job done.

In addition to the Arduino, a thermocouple measures the temperature and that takes a little circuitry in the form of a MAX31855. There’s also a relay to turn the heater on and off. There are other ways to control AC power, of course, and if a relay offends your sensibilities you can always opt for a solid state one.

The only other wrinkle was the addition of an extra power supply so the fan could operate without the heater. There might have been some other ways to manage that, but power supplies are cheap enough and at least the strapped on power supply counterbalances the strapped on Arduino on the other side of the popper.

We’ve seen popcorn poppers used like this before, of course. Thermocouples are a great way to measure high temperatures, but there are lots of other ways to measure that particular quantity.

Just as we are driven today to watch gifs that get better with every loop, people 100+ years ago entertained themselves with various persistence of vision toys that used the power of optical illusions to make still images come to life. [jollifactory] recently recreated one of the first POV devices — the phenakistoscope — into a toy for our times.

The original phenakistoscopes were simple, but the effect they achieved was utterly amazing. Essentially a picture disk with a handle, the user would hold the handle with one hand and spin the disk with the other while looking in a mirror through slits in the disk. Unlike the phenakistoscopes of yore that could only be viewed by one person at a time, this one allows for group watching.

Here’s how it works: an Arduino Nano spins a BLDC motor from an old CD-ROM drive, and two strips of strobing LEDs provide the shutter effect needed to make the pictures look like a moving image.The motor speed is both variable and reversible so the animations can run in both directions.

To make the disks themselves, [jollifactory] printed some original phenakistiscopic artwork and adhered each one to a CD that conveniently snaps onto the motor spindle. Not all of the artwork looks good with a big hole in the middle, so [jollifactory] created a reusable base disk with an anti-slip mat on top to spin those.

If you just want to watch the thing in action, check out the first video below that is all demonstration. There be strobing lights ahead, so consider yourself warned. The second and third videos show [jollifactory] soldering up the custom PCB and building the acrylic stand.

There are plenty of modern ways to build old-fashioned POV toys, from all-digital to all-printable.

Keyboard shortcuts are great. Even so, a person can only be expected to remember so many shortcuts and hit them accurately while giving a presentation over Zoom. [Sebastian] needed a good set of of shortcuts for OBS and decided to make a macro keyboard to help out. By the time he was finished, [Sebastian] had macro’d all the things and built a beautiful and smart peripheral that anyone with a pulse would likely love to have gracing their desk.

The design started with OBS, but this slick little keyboard turned into a system-wide assistant. It assigns the eight keys dynamically based on the program that has focus, and even updates the icon to show changes like the microphone status.

This is done with a Python script on the PC that monitors the running programs and updates the macro keeb accordingly using a serial protocol that [Sebastian] wrote. Thanks to the flexibility of this design, [Sebastian] can even use it to control the office light over MQTT and make the CO2 monitor send a color-coded warning to the jog wheel when there’s trouble in the air.

This project is wide open with fabulous documentation, and [Sebastian] is eager to see what improvements and alternative enclosure materials people come up with. Be sure to check out the walk-through/build video after the break.

Inspired to make your own, but want to start smaller? There are plenty to admire around here.

These days, there’s a huge variety of screens on the market for use with microcontrollers. OLEDs and graphic LCDs abound, while e-ink devices tempt the user with their clean look and low energy consumption. However, for many purposes, the humble HD44780 character LCD does the job just fine. If you’re using such a device, you might want to implement a simple menu system, and in that case, [MyHomeThings] has you covered.

The menu code is simple to modify and implement. It allows the user to define a certain number of menu items, along with button labels and functions to be executed with button presses. By default, it’s set up to work with  left and right function buttons, with up and down buttons to toggle through the menu’s various entries. This suits the commonly available Arduino shields which combine a 16×2 character LCD with a set of four tactile buttons in a cross formation. However, modifying the code to use an alternate button scheme would be simple for those eager to tweak things to their liking.

For the absolute beginner to programming, it’s a great way to put together a simple interface for your microcontroller projects. It’s the sort of thing you might use if you’d built a do-everything Arduino handheld device, as we’ve seen built before. If you find text menus too archaic for your purposes, though, be sure to sound off with your favourite solutions in the comments.

The Raspberry Pi Pico burst onto the microcontroller scene last month with much fanfare, and is already popping up in projects left, right and center. Notable for its high clock speed and exciting IO features, it’s a breath of fresh air in a market slowly weaning itself onto ARM architectures and away from 8-bit staples. Not one to miss out on a slice of the action, Arduino have announced their own upcoming board based on the Pico’s RP2040 chip.

The board is named the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, a moniker that’s not just a mouthful but likely to be confused with existing Arduino Nano products. It sports several differences to the Raspberry Pi Pico, namely packing WiFi, Bluetooth, and an IMU on board which should make developing motion-sensitive and IoT projects easier, particularly in cases where the Pico’s flexible IO could be useful.

Naturally, Arduino IDE integration will be a major plus point that gets many makers on board, and we can imagine there will be swift development of libraries leveraging the RP2040’s PIO subsystem. If you still haven’t gotten the low down on the Raspberry Pi Pico yet, though, never fear – our own [Elliot Williams] can tell you everything you need to know!

[Thanks to Darrell Flenniken for the tip, via Tom’s Hardware]

There are a lot of stray cats roaming around [Red Tie Projects’] neighborhood, and no one seems to care much about what happens to them. Fortunately for the cats, [Red Tie Projects] cares quite a lot, as evidenced by this colossal cat condo they built. The cats retain their freedom, but get food and a warm, sheltered bed whenever they decide to grace [Red Tie Projects] with their presence.

[Red Tie Projects] built this sturdy shelter from pallet wood and did a fine job of it, sealing all the seams and screws up with wood putty and waterproofing it with silicone. Inside there’s a heated pillow, a light, and a remote-controlled camera so RTP] can pan around and keep an eye on the cats. All the wires run out through a weatherproof junction box attached to the side and over to a control box made from an ATX power supply.

Most of the build is made from scrap, including the best part — an Arduino-driven motorized zip line for delivering food from the balcony to the cat porch. Details on the control box and the food delivery system are coming soon, as [Red Tie Projects] teases in the video after the break. We’re looking forward to seeing those. Oh, and don’t worry — there’s more than enough footage to cover the cat tax.

If [Red Tie Projects] ever takes any of those cats in, their demands will only increase. Maybe they can handle the sound of a motorized chair that follows the sun, since they’re tough street cats and all.

Considering the state of well, everything, we can’t tell you how glad we are to be out of school. That goes double for not being a teacher these days. [Elena] had some awesome light-up tactile buttons set aside for a killer Kerbal Space Program controller, but it’s funny how a pandemic will change your priorities. Instead, those buttons found a good home in this colorful and enticing Zoom control panel.

[Elena]’s ready pile of Arduinos yielded no Leonardos or Pro Micros, but that’s okay because there’s a handy bootloader out there that allows you to reprogram the USB interface chip of an Uno or a Mega and use it as a keyboard. After setting that up, it was mostly a matter of wiring all those latching and momentary buttons and LEDs to the Mega and making them look fantastic with a set of icons. (We all know the big red mushroom button is for aborting the call; so does it really need an icon?)

[Elena] was inspired by the Zoom call-terminating pull chain we saw a month or so ago as well as the pink control box that launched a thousand or so macro keyboards. Have you made your own sanity-saving solution for our times? Let us know!

Call us easily amused, but we think it’s pretty amazing what can be done with a microcontroller, some RGB LEDs, and a little bit of plastic. Case in point is [andrei.erdei]’s beautiful and quite approachable fiber optic LED lamp. It’s a desktop-friendly version of a similar piece [andrei] made that is roughly nine times the size of this one and hangs on the wall. The build may be simple, but the product is intricately lovely.

We really like the visual density of this lamp — it’s just the right amount of tubes and strikes a balance between being too sparse and too chaotic. As you might expect, there’s an Arduino and some RGB LED strips involved. But the key to this build is in the 16 pieces of side-glow plastic fiber optic tubing. Side-glow is designed to let light escape along the length of the tube as opposed to end-glow, which is made to minimize light loss from one end to the other like a data pipe. This allows for all sorts of fun effects, and you can watch [andrei.erdei] go slowly and soothingly through the different colors and modes in the demo video after the break. Make sure you watch long enough to see the tubes move like the old Windows 3D pipes screensaver

Already have too many knickknacks and wall hangings? You’re missing out on prime real estate — the ceiling. Check out this fiber optic ceiling installation that reacts to music.

Older industrial equipment is often a great option if you’re on a budget, and you might even be able to add some premium features yourself. [Brett] from [Theoretically Practical] has done with his old MIG welder, adding premium control features with the help of an Arduino.

The main features [Brett] were after is pre-flow, post-flow, and a spot welding timer. Pre-flow starts the flow of shielding gas a moment before energizing the filler wire, while post-flow keeps the gas after the weld is complete. This reduces the chances of oxygen contaminating the welds. A spot welding timer automatically limits welding time, enabling consistent and repeatable spot welds.

The Miller S-22A wire feeder can have these features, but it requires an expensive and difficult to find control unit. All it does is time the activation of the relays that control the gas flow, power, and wire feeder, so [Brett] decided to use an Arduino instead. The welders control circuit runs and 24V, so an optoisolator receives the trigger signal, and relays are used for outputs. Potentiometers were added to the original control panel, and all the wiring was neatly fitted behind it. The upgrade worked perfectly and allowed [Brett] to increase the quality of his welds. See the video after the break for the full details.

Inverter welders can be picked up for ridiculously cheap prices, if you’re willing to live with the trade-offs. We’ve also seen some other DIY welder upgrades, on small and large machines.