Planet Arduino

With Christmas just around the corner, you may start reminiscing about childhood races down the stairs to rip open presents under the tree. You’ll likely never do be any faster than you were when you were 12, but why not turn stair racing into an event anyway? Jared Dilley made that possible with his stairway stopwatch device.

It seems prudent to give you a disclaimer here: running up and down stairs is dangerous. We promise that your bones aren’t nearly as resilient as they were when you were a kid.

Dilley’s device is a timer system meant to measure the time it takes to ascend or descend a flight of stairs. It could also be used for races across flat ground or any other kind of terrain. That’s because it consists of two separate units that act as race gates. Each has an ultrasonic sensor to detect a passing person. Together, they measure the time it takes to pass the second gate after triggering the first.

Each unit contains an Arduino Nano board and the two boards communicate via HC-12 433MHz radio transceiver modules. Those have enough range to allow for positioning anywhere within a house, assuming you don’t live in a mansion with multiple wings. The primary unit displays the current record on a small LCD screen, as well as the most recent time on a large LED matrix panel. Both the primary and secondary units have nifty 3D-printed enclosures that Dilley designed to mount onto walls.

If you want to start your own racing career, all of the design files are available on GitHub.

The post Stairway stopwatch tracks climb time appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Before smartphones exploded on the scene in the late 00s, there was still a reasonable demand for pocket-sized computers that could do relatively simple computing tasks. Palm Pilots and other PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) were all the rage in the ’90s and early ’00s, although for cutting-edge tech from that era plenty of these devices had astronomical price tags. This Arduino-based PDA hearkens back to that era, albeit with a much more accessible parts list.

The build is based around an Arudino Nano with an OLED screen and has the five necessary functions for a PDA: calculator, stopwatch, games, phonebook, and a calendar. With all of these components on such a small microcontroller, memory quickly became an issue when using the default libraries. [Danko] uses his own custom libraries in order to make the best use of memory which are all available on the project’s GitHub page. The build also includes a custom PCB to keep the entire pocket computer pocket-sized.

There are some other features packed into this tiny build as well, like the breakout game that can be played with a potentiometer. It’s an impressive build that makes as much use of the microcontroller’s capabilities as is possible, and if you enjoy projects where a microcontroller is used as if it is a PC take a look at this Arduino build with its own command-line interface.

When building projects with a simple goal in mind, it’s not unheard of for us to add more and more switches, buttons, and complexity as the project goes through its initial prototyping stages. Feature creep like this tends to result in a tangled mess rather than a usable project. With enough focus, though, it’s possible to recognize when it’s happening and keep to the original plans. On the other hand, this single-button project with more than one use seems to be the opposite of feature creep. (YouTube, embedded below.)

[Danko]’s project has one goal: be as useful as possible while only using a single button and a tiny screen. Right now the small handheld device can be used as a stopwatch, a counter, and can even play a rudimentary version of flappy bird. It uses an Arduino Pro Mini, a 64×48 OLED screen running on I2C, and has a miniscule 100 mAh 3.7V battery to power everything. The video is worth watching if you’ve never worked with this small of a screen before, too.

Getting three functions out of a device with only one button is a pretty impressive feat, and if you can think of any other ways of getting more usefulness out of something like this be sure to leave it in the comments below. [Danko] is no stranger to simple projects with tiny screens, either. We recently featured his homebrew Arduino calculator that uses an even smaller screen.

by Conor M @ instructables.com:

This Instructable will show you how to make a stop watch out of an Arduino.

Arduino Stopwatch – [Link]

by Conor M @ instructables.com:

This Instructable will show you how to make a stop watch out of an Arduino.

Arduino Stopwatch – [Link]