Planet Arduino

Humans evolved to sleep and wake according to natural light cycles. So it is strange that we, as a society, have largely chosen to rely on blaring alarms to wake up in the mornings. Wake-up lights have been gaining traction in recent years because they provide a pleasant experience that mirrors the rising sun — but at the time you need it. If you want a DIY option, AWAKE is a very aesthetically pleasing wake-up light.

This seems to be a concept with a prototype that isn’t quite finished yet, but the renders certainly look good. AWAKE uses two bright LED bulbs from flashlights to shine through arc-shaped diffusers, creating an arch. The idea is that the lights will gradually increase in brightness until you wake up. But there is also an integrated speaker, so it can sound an alarm at the last moment if you still haven’t woken up. There also appears to be a stand where you can place your smartphone, and it would be nifty if that included a wireless charger.

The heart of the AWAKE device is an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect board. It has built-in Wi-Fi®, which is great for keeping time via the local network. It also has a Bluetooth® and BLE adapter, and those could be useful for setting alarms. The LEDs come from flashlights, so they’re extremely bright. Finally, and MP3 module can store and play audio files for the alarm sounds.

While the prototype doesn’t seem to be complete, the design files are available so you should be able to build an AWAKE wake-up light if you’re interested.

The post AWAKE is a very pretty wake-up light appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Meet Cynthia Cho

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The post Maker Spotlight: Cynthia Cho appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Christmas light displays winking and flashing in sync to music are a surefire way to rack up views on YouTube and annoy your neighbours. Inspired by one such video, [Akshay James] set up his own display and catalogued the process in this handy tutorial to get you started on your own for the next holiday season.

[James], using the digital audio workstation Studio One, took the MIDI data for the song ‘Carol of the Bells’ and used that as the light controller data for the project’s Arduino brain. Studio One sends out the song’s MIDI data, handled via the Hairless MIDI to serial bridge, to the Arduino which in turn sets the corresponding bit to on or off. That gets passed along to three 74HC595 shift registers — and their three respective relay boards — which finally trigger the relay for the string of lights.

From there, it’s a matter of wiring up the Arduino shift register boards, relays, and connecting the lights. Oh, and be sure to mount a speaker outdoors so passers-by can enjoy the music:

Be sure to set up a secondary power source for the relays, as drawing the power from the Arduino is likely to cause big problems. If your preferred digital audio workstation doesn’t have a virtual MIDI instrument, [James] used loopMIDI for the desired effect. He has also provided the code he used to save you some trouble if you’re building this during an invariably hectic holiday season.

Of course, you could always plug your lights into an IoT power bar and have fun that way.

This holiday season there are so many ways to customize your lights with DIY electronics.

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The post 10 Merry Circuits to Illuminate Your Holiday appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

This holiday season there are so many ways to customize your lights with DIY electronics.

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The post 10 Merry Circuits to Illuminate Your Holiday appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Well all know cellular automata from Conway’s Game of Life which simulates cellular evolution using rules based on the state of all eight adjacent cells. [Gavin] has been having fun playing with elementary cellular automata in his spare time. Unlike Conway’s Game, elementary automata uses just the left and right neighbors of a cell to determine the next cell ahead in the row. Despite this comparative simplicity, some really complex patterns emerge, including a Turing-complete one.

[Gavin] started off doing the calculations by hand for fun. He made some nice worksheets for this. As we can easily imagine, doing the calculations by hand got boring fast. It wasn’t long before his thoughts turned to automating his cellular automata. So, he put together an automatic cellular automator. (We admit, we are having a bit of fun with this.)

This could have been a quick software project but half the fun is seeing the simulations on a purpose-built ecosystem. The files to build the device are hosted on Thingiverse. Like other cellular automata projects, it uses LED matrices to display the data. An Arduino acts as the brain and some really cool retro switches from the world’s most ridiculously organized electronics collection finish the look of the project.

To use, enter the starting condition with the switches at the bottom. The code on the Arduino then computes and displays the pattern on the matrix. Pretty cool and way faster than doing it by hand.

Akiba of Freaklabs helped design sequenced lighting like those used in the Wrecking Crew Orchestra shows

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The post How to Sequence LEDs to Music: A Tutorial by Freaklabs appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Trick-or-treaters are bound to get a thrill when you make this choreographed music and light display that plays each time your gate is opened.

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The post Choreograph a Music and Light Display for the Holiday appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

[Hunter] wanted to do something a bit more interesting for his holiday lights display last year. Rather than just animated lights, he wanted something that was driven by data. In this case, his display was based on the mood of people in his city. We’ve seen a very similar project in the past, but this one has a few notable differences.

The display runs off of an Arduino. [Hunter] is using an Ethernet shield to connect the Arduino to the Internet. It then monitors all of the latest tweets from users within a 15 mile radius of his area. The tweets are then forwarded to the Alchemy Sentiment API for analysis. The API uses various algorithms and detection methods to identify the overall sentiment within a body of text. [Hunter] is using it to determine the general mood indicated by the text of a given tweet.

Next [Hunter] needed a way to somehow display this information. He opted to use an LED strip. Since the range of sentiments is rather small, [Hunter] didn’t want to display the overall average sentiment. This value doesn’t change much over short periods of time, so it’s not very interesting to see. Instead, he plots the change made since the last sample. This results in a more obvious change to the LED display.

Another interesting thing to note about this project is that [Hunter] is using the snow in his yard to diffuse the light from the LEDs. He’s actually buried the strip under a layer of snow. This has the result of hiding the electronics, but blurring the light enough so you can’t see the individual LEDs. The effect is rather nice, and it’s something different to add to your holiday lights display. Be sure to check out the video below for a demonstration.

December is finally here and we can start thinking about indoor or outdoor decorations for the holiday. Christmas lights are an excellent way to light up any event and a user on instructables wanted to be able to control the lights remotely with text messages.

Check his 12-step tutorial  and take a look at the bill of materials:

• An Arduino Yún – You could use another Arduino with a Wifi Shield though.
• A Protoshield with (or without) a tiny breadboard
• A regular breadboard will work as well, but will be less compact.
  If you want to solder more, you can just use a small circuit board instead.
• A 5V relay
• A piezo buzzer
• Wires
• A battery operated Christmas decoration (It’s not even Thanksgiving, so I’m using a Halloween decoration)
• A Temboo account
• A Twilio account