Tired of wondering what time it is at night, only to have to roll over to look at your alarm clock? If you’d like to avoid this nighttime inconvenience, then Kurt Andros has a great solution with his Arduino Mega-based Overhead Alarm Clock. 

The device consists of a nice wooden housing that gets mounted to a wall above where you sleep, and has separate displays for the alarm time and current time.

Instead of a menu system that you must navigate through to tune settings, the clock features buttons to change both current time and alarm time, as well as potentiometer knobs to modify brightness and alarm volume. The result is a simple interface that requires little thought to set up, and no snooze button since you can simply reprogram the wake-up time with a single button.

The overhead alarm clock offers the following features: 

• Time and alarm time can be read effortlessly and glare-free even in the dark; without glasses, without pressing buttons, without having to leave the right or left side position.

• The alarm clock can also be operated in the dark and with only one hand.

• The alarm clock can be used by a first-time user by looking at the control panel. Reading any operating instructions is not necessary.

• It wakes you up with a pleasant, volume adjustable sound (MP3 song).

• It also functions reliably in the event of a power failure.

• It is very accurate and independent of the reception of a radio signal, the power line frequency and the ambient temperature.

• It does not occupy space on the nightstand.

Sound like something you’d like in your bedroom? You can find Andros’ full project write-up here.

Ukuleles can be a lot of fun to play, and since cheap yet very playable versions can be had for under $50, they make a great target for hacking. And what better way to decorate an instrument by adding LEDs?

Elaine Chow did just that to her uke, adding six LEDs in the fingerboard along with another five embedded in the headstock. Each of these LEDs are controlled with an Arduino Uno, which light up to indicate the four most important chords: C, G, Am, and F. 

This can be set up to sequence through noted in a pre-defined path, and she’s working on a system that will detect when the correct finger positions are pressed, then moving on to the next note.

You may laugh off the ukulele as a toy or joke instrument, and admittedly, their starting price tag and the quality that usually comes with such a price tag doesn’t help much to get a different opinion on that. But it also makes it the perfect instrument for your next project. After all, they’re easy to handle, portable, and cheap enough to use a drill and other tools on them without too much regret. Plus, a little knowledge to play can get you far, and [Elaine] can teach you the essential, “all the pop songs use it”, four chords with her Arduino powered LED Ukulele.

As first step, [Elaine] drilled holes in her ukulele’s fingerboard to place some LEDs at all the positions required to play the four chords C, G, Am, and F. Connected to an Arduino attached to the ukulele’s back, each chord will light up its associated LEDs to indicate the finger positions required to play the chord itself. Taking the teaching part a step further, her next step is to extend each LED with a second, light sensing one, and read back if the fingers are placed at the correct position.

[Elaine] has already plans to turn the ukulele into an interactive game next. And if four chords are eventually not enough for you anymore, have a look at another LED based project teaching to play any major, minor and major seventh chord on the ukulele.

In European medieval folklore, a practitioner of magic may call for assistance from a familiar spirit who takes an animal form disguise. [Alex Glow] is our modern-day Merlin who invoked the magical incantations of 3D printing, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi to summon her familiar Archimedes: The AI Robot Owl.

The key attraction in this build is Google’s AIY Vision kit. Specifically the vision processing unit that tremendously accelerates image classification tasks running on an attached Raspberry Pi Zero W. It no longer consumes several seconds to analyze each image, classification can now run several times per second, all performed locally. No connection to Google cloud required. (See our earlier coverage for more technical details.) The default demo application of a Google AIY Vision kit is a “joy detector” that looks for faces and attempts to determine if a face is happy or sad. We’ve previously seen this functionality mounted on a robot dog.

[Alex] aimed to go beyond the default app (and default box) to create Archimedes, who was to reward happy people with a sticker. As a moving robotic owl, Archimedes had far more crowd appeal than the vision kit’s default cardboard box. All the kit components have been integrated into Archimedes’ head. One eye is the expected Pi camera, the other eye is actually the kit’s piezo buzzer. The vision kit’s LED-illuminated button now tops the dapper owl’s hat.

Archimedes was created to join in Google’s promotion efforts. Their presence at this Maker Faire consisted of two tents: one introductory “Learn to Solder” tent where people can create a blinky LED badge, and the other tent is focused on their line of AIY kits like this vision kit. Filled with demos of what the kits can do aside from really cool robot owls.

Hopefully these promotional efforts helped many AIY kits find new homes in the hands of creative makers. It’s pretty exciting that such a powerful and inexpensive neural net processor is now widely available, and we look forward to many more AI-powered hacks to come.

This device by Dejan Nedelkovski of How To Mechatronics implements both an ultrasonic sensor for range measurement and an accelerometer for measuring angles. While you’ve likely seen these implemented separately in other projects, combining them saves space, and allows the Arduino Nano onboard to use the two readings together to calculate a square area automatically.

User interface consists of a power switch, along with a single button for program interaction and to choose between the different measurement routines. Results are displayed on an LCD screen, and the electronics are encased in clear acrylic for visibility. 

Code and PCB files are available on the project’s write-up, and the video below gives a nice overview of its functionality and build process.

If you have young kids, you’ve probably realized that they don’t exactly like to sleep in. While their energy levels are enviable, if their clock-reading skills haven’t yet caught up, this device by maker “JonathonT” looks like a great and simple solution.

With help from an Arduino and an RTC module, Jonathon uses a trio of LEDs to show red for “stay in bed,” yellow for “almost time,” and green to indicate “you can get up.” While the current 7:00am starting time might still seem early to some, when compared to his son’s previous 5:30-or-so awakening, this is a huge improvement. Cleverly, the LEDs are diffused with a normal white plastic stadium cup with wax paper inside, making it a very accessible project!

GREEN MEANS GO!!! RED, STAY IN BED!!! This simple, inexpensive Arduino real-time clock can be set to light up LEDs at whatever time necessary. For us that means at 6:00am it turns RED, STAY IN BED. Then 10 minutes before 7:00am it turns YELLOW giving the indication it is almost time to come out and to play in your room. Then at 7:00am… “The light is GREEN!!!”, he says, as he bursts into our room each morning no earlier than 7:00am. What a lifesaver!!!

Sound like something you can use in your home? You can find build instructions here.

Graduate students Ben Wiener and Philip Zucker have been working on a classic controls problem for quite some time called an “inverted pendulum.” This type of device balances a stick on an axis, and in this implementation, a motor pulls the axis assembly that the pendulum—a paint stirrer—is sitting on to keep it stable.

Control is handled by an Arduino Uno, which measures the angle of the stirrer as well as the position of the axis via a pair of encoders.

The inverted pendulum or cart pole is a classic problem in control theory. It’s in OpenAI Gym of course, but we wanted to see it work in real life, not some lame simulation. 

It took a few iterations, but we eventually found a system that works well. Our cart is 3D printed PLA driven by a DC motor via a toothed belt. The pole itself is a paint stirrer. One of the longer type, about 24″. A rotary encoder opposite the motor acts as a pulley for the belt and allows us to track the motion of the cart, while a second rotary encoder on the cart is a pivot for the pole and measures its angle. The motor is controlled by a 32 amp Sabertooth motor controller. It’s overkill, and pretty expensive at about $120, but we already had it for another project. We monitored the encoders with an Arduino. The foundation of the system is a piece of extruded aluminum rail called V-Slot, on which the cart slides and the motor and encoder are mounted. Our rail is 1.5 m long, from a company called  .

Code for the setup can be found on GitHub and be sure to see it in action in the video below, as it swings the wooden stick from rest into a vertical position.

Farmers have long been known for their ingenuity, able to accomplish urgent repairs with whatever is on hand. Now with the help of an Arduino, maker “rscholten” has even figured out how to automate his chicken coop.

The device uses an Uno and a real-time clock module to schedule his automated coop door’s movement, while a servo and linkage system physically flips the door open and closed. A solenoid then locks the door in place when not in motion so that the servo doesn’t have to constantly maintain a position. 

User interface is provided by a 7-segment LED, along with dials to set the current time and when it should be opened and closed. As shown in the video below, the coop can also be activated with a keyfob style remote when needed.

I built this automatic chicken door to save me the twice daily task of opening and closing the door in the morning and evening. Chickens are great providers of eggs, manure and entertainment, but getting up early to let them out the coop – especially in winter – was drudgery. And then making sure I was home in time to close them in really restricted my freedom to come home late.

Chickens follow a daily routine of returning to a coop around sunset and waking up around sunrise. The times they go in and out is not exact and is influenced on the weather of the day and ambient light. Should a chicken be seen to be too late to enter after the door closed, the door can be remotely opened then closed. The door can be closed during the day should the owner need to stop broody chickens from entering.

As sunrise and sunset times vary throughout the year and depend on the latitude, any door controller needs to track the time of day, the day of the year and know the latitude of the location. This requirement can be accomplished with software or a sun tracker, but in this design uses manually adjustable open and close time settings to keep things simpler.

It’s a problem common to every hackerspace, university machine shop, or even the home shops of parents with serious control issues: how do you make sure that only trained personnel are running the machines? There are all kinds of ways to tackle the problem, but why not throw a little tech at it with something like this magnetic card-reader machine lockout?

[OnyxEpoch] does not reveal which of the above categories he falls into, if any, but we’ll go out on a limb and guess that it’s a hackerspace because it would work really well in such an environment. Built into a sturdy steel enclosure, the guts are pretty simple — an Arduino Uno with shields for USB, an SD card, and a data logger, along with an LCD display and various buttons and switches. The heart of the thing is a USB magnetic card reader, mounted to the front of the enclosure.

To unlock the machine, a user swipes his or her card, and if an administrator has previously added them to the list, a relay powers the tool up. There’s a key switch for local override, of course, and an administrative mode for programming at the point of use. Tool use is logged by date, time, and user, which should make it easy to identify mess-makers and other scofflaws.

We find it impressively complete, but imagine having a session timeout in the middle of a machine operation would be annoying at the least, and potentially dangerous at worst. Maybe the solution is a very visible alert as the timeout approaches — a cherry top would do the trick!

There’s more reading if you’re one seeking good ideas for hackerspace. We’ve covered the basics of hackerspace safety before, as well as insurance for hackerspaces.

This week, Arduino announced a lot of new hardware including an exceptionally interesting FPGA development board aimed at anyone wanting to dip their toes into the seas of VHDL and developing with programmable logic. We think it’s the most interesting bit of hardware Arduino has released since their original dev board, and everyone is wondering what the hardware actually is, and what it can do.

This weekend at Maker Faire Bay Area, Arduino was out giving demos for all their wares, and yes, the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 was on hand, being shown off in a working demo. We have a release date and a price. It’ll be out next month (June 2018) for about $60 USD.

But what about the hardware, and what can it do? From the original press releases, we couldn’t even tell how many LUTs this FPGA had. There were a lot of questions about the Mini PCIe connectors, and we didn’t know how this FPGA would be useful for high-performance computation like decoding video streams. Now we have the answers.

The FPGA on board the Arduino Vidor is an Altera Cyclone 10CL016. This chip has 16k logic elements, and 504 kB memory block. This is on the low end of Altera’s FPGA lineup, but it’s still no slouch. In the demo video below, it’s shown decoding video and identifying QR codes in real time. That’s pretty good for what is effectively a My First FPGA board.

Also on board the Vidor is a SAMD21 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller and a uBlox module housing an ESP-32 WiFi and Bluetooth module. This is a really great set of chips, and if you’re looking to get into FPGA development, this might just be the board for you. We haven’t yet seen the graphic editor that will be used to work with IP for the FPGA (for those who don’t care to write their own VHDL or Verilog), but we’re looking forward to the unveiling of that new software.