Continuing the saga of the incubator project in the recent posts:

• Temperature-control project for freshman design seminar describes an idea for a possible project for the freshman design seminar.
• PWM for incubator gives a bit more detail on the temperature-control project.
• More on incubator design continues the incubator design.
• Thermal models for power resistors presents thermal models for 3 power resistors without heatsinks.
• Thermal models for power resistor with heatsink applies the simple thermal model to a power resistor with a heatsink, where it does not fit quite as well.
• PWM heater and fan talks about doing PWM for a fan and for a resistor as heater.
• PWM heater and fan continued continues the previous design work, reducing the electrical noise and making PI control loops for the fan and the heater.
• Controlling the heater and fan talks about progress on the control loops and gives the schematic for the circuit discussed in the two previous posts.

On my to-do list for the project

• Put the whole thing into a styrofoam box, to see whether extra venting is needed to allow things to cool down, and to see how tightly temperature can be controlled. Find a smaller bread board or prototype board to put the controller on—my current bread boards are all 6.5″ long, and the box only has room for 6″, especially since I put the resistor in the center of the 6″×12″ aluminum plate, which just fits the box. I suppose I could drill a couple more holes in the plate and mount the resistor off center, but I rather like the idea of building the controller as an Arduino shield, so that the Arduino + controller is a single unit. Another possibility is to drill a hole in the styrofoam box and run cables through the box for the resistive heater, the fan, and the thermistor. Even if the grounds are connected outside the box, this is only 8 wires. Putting the control electronics outside the box would reduce the clutter in the box and make tweaking easier
  

  I got this done today, by drilling a hole in the box and soldering long wires onto the resistor and the thermistor, so that all the active electronics could live outside the box. Incidentally, “drilling” did mean using a drill bit, but I held it and turned it with my fingers—styrofoam is so soft and grainy that I feared a power drill would tear out big chunks.

  

  Here is the interior of the styrofoam box, with the lid open. The 6″×12″ aluminum plate covers the bottom. The thermistor is on the left, propped up by a rubber foot, the resistor in is the center, and the fan is sitting on a foam pad on the right. (The foam is to reduce noise until I can get the fan proper mounted in a baffle.)

  As expected, I can heat up the thermistor fairly quickly, but if I overshoot on the temperature, it takes a very long time for the closed box to cool back down. Cooling off just 1°C took over half an hour.

• Add some low-pass filtering to the temperature measurement to reduce noise. Just adding 4 measurements in quick succession would reduce the noise and give the illusion of extra precision.

  I did this also. With the box closed, the thermistor reading is fairly stable, with fluctuations of less than 0.1°C (which was the resolution with a single thermistor reading before adding 4 successive reads).

• The fan controller occasionally has a little glitch where the tachometer either misses a pulse or provides an extra one (I think mainly an extra one due to ringing on the opposite edge).  I could try reducing this problem in three ways: 1) changing which edge I’m triggering on, 2) using more low-pass filtering before the Schmitt trigger in the edge detector, or 3) using median filtering to throw out any half-length or double-length pulses, unless they occur as a pair.  (Hmm, the half-length pulses would occur as a pair, so this might not help unless I go to median of 5, which would be a lot of trouble.)

  I fixed this also, using two techniques:

  1. In the program I have 3 states for the interrupt routine that catches the edges: normally, I check that the edge is within 3/4 to 3/2 of the previously recorded pulse—if so I record it and continue. If it is less than 3/4 as long, I skip it, and change to a skip state. If it is more than 3/2 as long, I skip it and switch to a force state. In the skip state, I ignore the reading and switch to the force state. In the force state, I accept the pulse length (whatever it is), and switch to the normal state. With this state machine, I ignore a double-length pulse or a pair of half-length pulses together.
  2. The rising edge of the pulse from the tachometer is very slow (thanks to the RC filter of the pullup), but the falling edge is sharp. Extraneous pulses are more likely to occur if I trigger on the slow edge rather than fast edge, so I switched the polarity to make sure that I was using the falling edge (which is the rising edge of the output of the Schmitt trigger).

  I think that changing which edge I used made a bigger difference than trying to suppress the erroneous reads digitally. I no longer hear the occasional hiccup where the control algorithm tries desperately to double or half the fan speed because of a misread timing pulse.

• Improve my anti-windup methods for both thermal and fan controllers, to reduce overshoot.

  I changed from using conditional integration and back calculation of the integration error to using a decay of the integration error based on the difference between the computed PWM setting and the limit when the limits were exceeded. I’m not sure this improved anything though, and it introduces yet another parameter to tune, so I may go back to the previous method. I did play around with the tuning parameters for the fan loop today, and realized that I still don’t have good intuition about the effect of parameter changes. I noticed that the fan control was oscillating a little (small fluctuations around the desired speed, but big enough that I could hear the changes), and I found ways to reduce the oscillations, but at the expense of slower response to step changes.

• Improve my modeling of the thermal system, so that I can do more reasonable back calculation on setpoint change.

  I still need to do more thinking about the thermal modeling, since it is clear that I can’t afford overshoot when heating (though overshoot during slow cooling is unlikely to be a problem).

Still on my list with no progress:

• Consider using a PID controller for the temperature to get faster response without overshoot.  (If I can reduce the noise problem.)
• Design and build baffling for the fan to get better airflow in the box. I’ve made a little paper and wire baffle, to get better air flow over the resistor, but I’ve not done the full baffling to get good airflow in the box.
  
• Figure out how to get students to come up with workable designs, when they are starting from knowing nothing. I don’t want to give them my designs, but I want to help them find doable subproblems. Some of the subproblems they come up with may be well beyond the skills that they can pick up in the time frame of the course. The more I work on this project, the more I realize that I and the students will have to be happy with them having explored the options, without getting all the problems solved.
  

I want to add to the list today:

• Add changes to the cumulative error term whenever K_P or T_I are changed, to keep the PWM output the same after the changes—currently changing any of the control loop parameters adds a huge disturbance to the system.
• Separate the control algorithm better from the rest of the code, so that I can use the same code base and quickly switch between different control algorithms: on/off, on/off with hysteresis, proportional control, proportional control with offset, PI control, PI control with anti-windup variants, PID control.
• Add an option for recording the response of the system over a long time, so that I can plot input and output of the system with gnuplot. This would be nice for the fan control loop, but I think it will be essential for the temperature control loop.
• Research control algorithms other than PI and PID, particularly for asymmteric systems like the temperature control, where I can get fairly quick response to the inputs when heating, but very slow response when cooling.

It’s hardly been a month since we first heard of the impossibly cheap WiFi adapter for micros, the ESP8266. Since then orders have slowly been flowing out of ports in China and onto the workbenches of tinkerers around the world. Finally, we have a working project using this module. It might only be a display to show the current weather conditions, but it’s a start, and only a hint of what this module can do.

Since the ESP8266 found its way into the storefronts of the usual distributors, a lot of effort has gone into translating the datasheets both on hackaday.io and the nurdspace wiki. The module does respond to simple AT commands, and with the right bit of code it’s possible to pull a few bits of data off of the Internet.

The code requests data from openweathermap.org and displays the current temperature, pressure, and humidity on a small TFT display. The entire thing is powered by just an Arduino, so for anyone wanting a cheap way to put an Arduino project on the Internet, there ‘ya go.

Arduino user Jubeso submitted to our blog an instructable explaining the 10 steps to build an input device for gaming.

The  Gravity Touch bluetooth glove  is specifically designed to interact with augmented reality glasses like the Google Glass, Meta, Moverio BT or with the VR headsets like Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, vrAse, Durovis Dive:

Those new products are amazing and they need new types of input devices. This instructable will describe how to build your own “Gravity Touch bluetooth glove” and I will also give you some tips to build your own Durovis Dive VR headset so that you will be able to enjoy full mobile VR. Because this glove will be of most use for VR game, I have created a Unity3D plugin for Android that handle the communication between your app and the glove. It means that you will be able to use your Gravity Touch glove to interact with your Unity3D VR game.

The Arduino code and the Java class I wrote to handle the communication between the glove and the Android device will also be available so that you will be able to adapt them for your need.

The bill of materials, among other things, contains an Arduino Micro , FreeIMU – an Open Hardware Framework for Orientation and Motion Sensing and 3m of flexible soft electric wire.

 

My attention is drawn towards the noise behind me....
I cannot believe it.
There it is.

  The Arduino is taking a SELFIE !!

 

How did this happen?
 
Well actually, it is not that difficult for an Arduino.
 
I found out that my Canon Powershot SX50 HS camera has a port on the side for a remote switch. In the "Optional Accessories" section of the camera brochure, it identifies the remote switch model as RS-60E3. I then looked up the model number on this website to find out the size of the jack (3 core, 2.5mm), and the pinout (Ground, focus and shutter) required to emulate the remote switch. Once I had this information, I was able to solder some really long wires to the jack and connect up the circuit (as described below).
 

And before I knew it, the Arduino was taking Selfies !!!

 
Warning : Any circuit you build for your camera (including this one) is at your own risk. I will not take responsibility for any damage caused to any of your equipment.
 

Parts Required:

• Freetronics Eleven or (Arduino UNO compatible board)
• 4 Channel Relay Module
• 2x 330 ohm resistors
• 2 x diodes
• breadboard
• Jumper Wires (male to male)
• Jumper Wires (female to male)


• Canon Powershot SX50 HS - (here is the brochure)
• Three core, 2.5 mm Jack

 

Fritzing Sketch

 

 
 

Connection Table

 

 
 

Three core, 2.5 mm jack

 

 
 

Camera Connection to Relays

 

 
 

Jack pinout

 

 
 

Completed Circuit

 

 
 

Arduino Sketch

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

/* ===============================================================       Project: Arduino Selfie        Author: Scott C       Created: 14th Sept 2014   Arduino IDE: 1.0.5       Website: http://arduinobasics.blogspot.com/p/arduino-basics-projects-page.html   Description: Arduino takes selfie every 30 seconds ================================================================== */  /*   Connect 5V on Arduino to VCC on Relay Module   Connect GND on Arduino to GND on Relay Module */    #define CH1 8   // Connect Digital Pin 8 on Arduino to CH1 on Relay Module  #define CH3 7   // Connect Digital Pin 7 on Arduino to CH3 on Relay Module    void setup(){    //Setup all the Arduino Pins    pinMode(CH1, OUTPUT);    pinMode(CH3, OUTPUT);        //Turn OFF any power to the Relay channels    digitalWrite(CH1,LOW);    digitalWrite(CH3,LOW);    delay(2000); //Wait 2 seconds before starting sequence  }    void loop(){    digitalWrite(CH1, HIGH); //Focus camera by switching Relay 1    delay(2000);    digitalWrite(CH1, LOW); //Stop focus    delay(100);    digitalWrite(CH3, HIGH); //Press shutter button for 0.5 seconds    delay(500);    digitalWrite(CH3,LOW); //Release shutter button    delay(30000); //Wait 30 seconds before next selfie  }

 

By connecting up the camera to an Arduino, the camera just got smarter !!
The Arduino connects to 2 different channels on the relay board in order to control the focus and the shutter of the camera. The relays are used to isolate the camera circuit from that of the Arduino. I have also included a couple of diodes and resistors in the circuit as an extra precaution, however they may not be needed.

Warning : Any circuit you build for your camera (including this one) is at your own risk. I will not take responsibility for any damage caused to any of your equipment. Do your research, and take any precautions you see fit.

 
 

The Video

 

 

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Right before the weekend of  World Maker Faire in NYC, Massimo Banzi will be at MakerCon with a keynote taking place on September 18 at 11 a.m local time. Makercon is a 2-day conference by and for makers organized around 4 specific tracks: Business of Making, Education, Maker Community Building, Tools of Innovation&Technology.

Makercon connects individuals at the forefront of the maker movement, focusing on the technologies, services ecosystem, manufacturing models, and funding trends that provide new ways of making things and getting them to market.

On Wednesday, September 17 at 7:30pm (after the Innovation Showcase) MakerCon will be able to watch the exclusive New York premiere screening of the acclaimed Neflix documentary Print the Legend. Right after the film, Dale Dougherty is moderating a panel discussion with some of the key players from the film.

Read more on MAKE

Some of our dear readers may already have an infallible system to remember different complex passwords for the different websites they visit daily. This is why they may have not been following the offline password keeper that the Hackaday community is building.

The Mooltipass has a characteristic that may regain their interest: it is possible to connect Arduino shields to it. In the video embedded below you can see the Arduino conversion process our development team imagined a few months back. The operation simply consists in using a knife to remove plastic bits on top of standard Arduino headers. We also embedded a few use cases with their respective sketches that may be downloaded from our official GitHub repository.

As with stacking several shields, a little tweaking may be required to keep the functionalities from both the Mooltipass and the connected shield. We therefore strongly welcome Arduino enthusiasts to let us know what they think of our setup.

In the meantime, you may want to subscribe to our official Google Group to stay informed of the Mooltipass launch date.

Here is the circuit for the heater and fan that I’ve been developing for incubator project for the freshman design course:

Here is the circuit I’ve been using for playing with control loops. (The 74HC14N Schmitt trigger inverter does not have an enable input, but SchemeIt has a very limited and idiosyncratic set of schematic symbols, so I used the closest one.)

Yesterday and this morning, when I was developing the controller software for the fan and resistive heater, I ran into a lot of problems with overshoot when changing the setpoints. For the fan controller I wrote “One thing that helped was not accumulating integral error when the PWM signal was pinned at the lowest or highest values.”  I also switched to using RPM rather than pulse duration as the measured variable, because RPM is nearly linear with the PWM input (RPM approximately 24.1 PWM + 878). Another thing “that helped was to make a guess at the target PWM setting when the setpoint was changed (using d RPM/ d PWM =24 and the current PWM setting and RPM value), then setting the cumulative error to what it would be in steady state at that PWM. I then set the PWM to five times as far from current PWM as the target PWM to make the transition as fast as possible without increasing overshoot, making sure to clip to the legal 0..255 range.”  Because I have a reasonable model for RPM as a function of PWM, it was easy to estimate what the target PWM should be so that the cumulative error from the integrator would set the PWM value correctly once the error dropped enough that the desired PWM value was no longer pinned at the limits.

Today I decided to do a little reading to find out what other people have done about the problem of the controller overshooting when the actuator hits its limits.  It turns out that the phenomenon is know as “integrator windup“, and the two solutions I came up with are standard solutions.  Turning off the error accumulation when the actuator is at its limit and more movement in that direction is desired is known as “conditional integration” and guessing the correct setting for the cumulative error on setpoint change is a form of “back calculation”.  There are more sophisticated forms of back calculation that I might want to try implementing.  (I found a better explanation of the anti-windup scheme, which I might base my next implementation on—basically it gradually reduces the cumulative error to 0 as long as the desired setting for the actuator is past its limits.)

The temperature controller has been harder for me to tune, for several reasons:

• The response time is very long.  Instead of oscillating around 5Hz, the period seems to be more like 90 seconds.  This means that it takes a long time to see whether an adjustment to the parameters makes a difference.
• The temperature at the thermistor is dependent on the temperature at the resistor.  The thermal mass and thermal resistance act like an RC circuit (with temperature analogous to voltage, and power dissipated analogous to current).  Adjusting the power to the resistor via PWM changes the rate at which the temperature increases.  It also changes the eventual equilibrium temperature, but the PWM control is more directly of the rate of temperature change.
• The heatsink and resistor continue to warm the air and the measuring thermistor even after all power to the resistor is cut off, so there is a big danger of overshoot whenever the setpoint temperature is increased.
• The control is asymmetric—dumping 40W of power into the resistor heats it up fairly fast, but heat is only slowly dissipated when power is turned off.  Running the fan fast helps a little here, slowing down the temperature rise and speeding up the cool down, but once I put the whole thing in a closed box, it will be very difficult to cool things off if the box gets too warm.  This makes overshoot in the positive direction  a serious problem.
• The temperature measurements are only about 0.1°C resolution, and the noise on the ADC is about ±4LSB, so it will be difficult to get tight temperature control, even with a perfectly tuned controller.
• I don’t have a simple model of what the steady-state thermistor temperature will be given the PWM input, so I’ve had difficulty coming up with a guess about the eventual PWM value for resetting the cumulative error on a setpoint change.  I have a model for the resistor temperature in still air, but the fan makes a huge difference, both in the thermal resistance (and so both the equilibrium temperature and time constant of the resistor heating) and in the coupling between the resistor and the thermistor.

I still have a lot of things left over from a couple of days ago, and I’ve added some new things to the list.

• Put the whole thing into a styrofoam box, to see whether extra venting is needed to allow things to cool down, and to see how tightly temperature can be controlled. I’ve put stuff in the box, but I can’t close the box with the stuff sticking out, so it doesn’t really count.
  
• Design and build baffling for the fan to get better airflow in the box. I’ve made a little paper and wire baffle, to get better air flow over the resistor, but I’ve not done the full baffling to get good airflow in the box.
  
• Figure out how to get students to come up with workable designs, when they are starting from knowing nothing. I don’t want to give them my designs, but I want to help them find doable subproblems.  Some of the subproblems they come up with may be well beyond the skills that they can pick up in the time frame of the course. The more I work on this project, the more I realize that I and the students will have to be happy with them having explored the options, without getting all the problems solved.
  
• Find a smaller bread board or prototype board to put the controller on—my current bread boards are all 6.5″ long, and the box only has room for 6″, especially since I put the resistor in the center of the 6″×12″ aluminum plate, which just fits the box.  I suppose I could drill a couple more holes in the plate and mount the resistor off center, but I rather like the idea of building the controller as an Arduino shield, so that the Arduino + controller is a single unit.
• Another possibility is to drill a hole in the styrofoam box and run cables through the box for the resistive heater, the fan, and the thermistor.  Even if the grounds are connected outside the box, this is only 8 wires. Putting the control electronics outside the box would reduce the clutter in the box and make tweaking easier.
• Add some low-pass filtering to the temperature measurement to reduce noise.  Just adding 4 measurements in quick succession would reduce the noise and give the illusion of extra precision.
• The fan controller occasionally has a little glitch where the tachometer either misses a pulse or provides an extra one (I think mainly an extra one due to ringing on the opposite edge).  I could try reducing this problem in three ways: 1) changing which edge I’m triggering on, 2) using more low-pass filtering before the Schmitt trigger in the edge detector, or 3) using median filtering to throw out any half-length or double-length pulses, unless they occur as a pair.  (Hmm, the half-length pulses would occur as a pair, so this might not help unless I go to median of 5, which would be a lot of trouble.)
• Improve my modeling of the thermal system, so that I can do more reasonable back calculation on setpoint change.
• Consider using a PID controller for the temperature to get faster response without overshoot.  (If I can reduce the noise problem.)
• Improve my anti-windup methods for both thermal and fan controllers, to reduce overshoot.

Here is the circuit for the heater and fan that I’ve been developing for incubator project for the freshman design course:

Here is the circuit I’ve been using for playing with control loops. (The 74HC14N Schmitt trigger inverter does not have an enable input, but SchemeIt has a very limited and idiosyncratic set of schematic symbols, so I used the closest one.)

Yesterday and this morning, when I was developing the controller software for the fan and resistive heater, I ran into a lot of problems with overshoot when changing the setpoints. For the fan controller I wrote “One thing that helped was not accumulating integral error when the PWM signal was pinned at the lowest or highest values.”  I also switched to using RPM rather than pulse duration as the measured variable, because RPM is nearly linear with the PWM input (RPM approximately 24.1 PWM + 878). Another thing “that helped was to make a guess at the target PWM setting when the setpoint was changed (using d RPM/ d PWM =24 and the current PWM setting and RPM value), then setting the cumulative error to what it would be in steady state at that PWM. I then set the PWM to five times as far from current PWM as the target PWM to make the transition as fast as possible without increasing overshoot, making sure to clip to the legal 0..255 range.”  Because I have a reasonable model for RPM as a function of PWM, it was easy to estimate what the target PWM should be so that the cumulative error from the integrator would set the PWM value correctly once the error dropped enough that the desired PWM value was no longer pinned at the limits.

Today I decided to do a little reading to find out what other people have done about the problem of the controller overshooting when the actuator hits its limits.  It turns out that the phenomenon is know as “integrator windup“, and the two solutions I came up with are standard solutions.  Turning off the error accumulation when the actuator is at its limit and more movement in that direction is desired is known as “conditional integration” and guessing the correct setting for the cumulative error on setpoint change is a form of “back calculation”.  There are more sophisticated forms of back calculation that I might want to try implementing.  (I found a better explanation of the anti-windup scheme, which I might base my next implementation on—basically it gradually reduces the cumulative error to 0 as long as the desired setting for the actuator is past its limits.)

The temperature controller has been harder for me to tune, for several reasons:

• The response time is very long.  Instead of oscillating around 5Hz, the period seems to be more like 90 seconds.  This means that it takes a long time to see whether an adjustment to the parameters makes a difference.
• The temperature at the thermistor is dependent on the temperature at the resistor.  The thermal mass and thermal resistance act like an RC circuit (with temperature analogous to voltage, and power dissipated analogous to current).  Adjusting the power to the resistor via PWM changes the rate at which the temperature increases.  It also changes the eventual equilibrium temperature, but the PWM control is more directly of the rate of temperature change.
• The heatsink and resistor continue to warm the air and the measuring thermistor even after all power to the resistor is cut off, so there is a big danger of overshoot whenever the setpoint temperature is increased.
• The control is asymmetric—dumping 40W of power into the resistor heats it up fairly fast, but heat is only slowly dissipated when power is turned off.  Running the fan fast helps a little here, slowing down the temperature rise and speeding up the cool down, but once I put the whole thing in a closed box, it will be very difficult to cool things off if the box gets too warm.  This makes overshoot in the positive direction  a serious problem.
• The temperature measurements are only about 0.1°C resolution, and the noise on the ADC is about ±4LSB, so it will be difficult to get tight temperature control, even with a perfectly tuned controller.
• I don’t have a simple model of what the steady-state thermistor temperature will be given the PWM input, so I’ve had difficulty coming up with a guess about the eventual PWM value for resetting the cumulative error on a setpoint change.  I have a model for the resistor temperature in still air, but the fan makes a huge difference, both in the thermal resistance (and so both the equilibrium temperature and time constant of the resistor heating) and in the coupling between the resistor and the thermistor.

I still have a lot of things left over from a couple of days ago, and I’ve added some new things to the list.

• Put the whole thing into a styrofoam box, to see whether extra venting is needed to allow things to cool down, and to see how tightly temperature can be controlled. I’ve put stuff in the box, but I can’t close the box with the stuff sticking out, so it doesn’t really count.
  
• Design and build baffling for the fan to get better airflow in the box. I’ve made a little paper and wire baffle, to get better air flow over the resistor, but I’ve not done the full baffling to get good airflow in the box.
  
• Figure out how to get students to come up with workable designs, when they are starting from knowing nothing. I don’t want to give them my designs, but I want to help them find doable subproblems.  Some of the subproblems they come up with may be well beyond the skills that they can pick up in the time frame of the course. The more I work on this project, the more I realize that I and the students will have to be happy with them having explored the options, without getting all the problems solved.
  
• Find a smaller bread board or prototype board to put the controller on—my current bread boards are all 6.5″ long, and the box only has room for 6″, especially since I put the resistor in the center of the 6″×12″ aluminum plate, which just fits the box.  I suppose I could drill a couple more holes in the plate and mount the resistor off center, but I rather like the idea of building the controller as an Arduino shield, so that the Arduino + controller is a single unit.
• Another possibility is to drill a hole in the styrofoam box and run cables through the box for the resistive heater, the fan, and the thermistor.  Even if the grounds are connected outside the box, this is only 8 wires. Putting the control electronics outside the box would reduce the clutter in the box and make tweaking easier.
• Add some low-pass filtering to the temperature measurement to reduce noise.  Just adding 4 measurements in quick succession would reduce the noise and give the illusion of extra precision.
• The fan controller occasionally has a little glitch where the tachometer either misses a pulse or provides an extra one (I think mainly an extra one due to ringing on the opposite edge).  I could try reducing this problem in three ways: 1) changing which edge I’m triggering on, 2) using more low-pass filtering before the Schmitt trigger in the edge detector, or 3) using median filtering to throw out any half-length or double-length pulses, unless they occur as a pair.  (Hmm, the half-length pulses would occur as a pair, so this might not help unless I go to median of 5, which would be a lot of trouble.)
• Improve my modeling of the thermal system, so that I can do more reasonable back calculation on setpoint change.
• Consider using a PID controller for the temperature to get faster response without overshoot.  (If I can reduce the noise problem.)
• Improve my anti-windup methods for both thermal and fan controllers, to reduce overshoot.

The connected birdhouse is a project prototyped during a workshop ran by Massimo Banzi at Boisbuchet, last August in France. It was developed using Arduino Yùn, by Valentina Chinnici, who shared with us the project, and two other students taking part to  the week of learning-by-doing around the theme of  the Internet of Trees.

They redesigned a traditional object, a wooden birdhouse to be placed outdoor, and connected it to a lamp shaped like a nest, to be placed indoor:

The connected birdhouse was in fact an interactive object able to communicate to the nest/lamp the presence of a bird inside the house, and accordingly to a color coded signal was giving also some informations about the size of the bird itself. In the event of a bird entering into the house, the nest/lamp remotely controlled via WiFi by an Arduino Yùn, was turned on. The nest/lamp received the notification from the birdhouse translating it firstly with a rainbow effect. After few seconds the light changed according to the weight of the bird (green, yellow or red).

The LED strip used for the nest lamp was an Adafruit Neopixel strip controlled by an Arduino Yún.

On this blog you can find the sketch to make it work and create one yourself.